Reading planet-php.org I found this great post about how to solve PHP session clustering in an easy way. Though it’s no silver bullet but it’s definitely worth knowing about. It uses few insantances of memcache that stores the same copies of sessions. And if one instance gets down the other keeps serving the sessions. It’s nice to have such kind of failover. Ofcourse after recovery you have to sync the instances. And your performance is going to suffer more and more if you add more memcache instances.

Though myself I feel this is a great poor man’s solution Might end up using it myself.

cluster, memcache, PHP, session Hide

Interesting read about order by rand optimization by Jan Kneschke. Haven’t used this myself but seems might be rather useful. The performance difference is huge. I wonder if MySQL could optimize ORDER BY RAND() itself when there are no data holes.

MySQL, Optimization, randomization, sorting Hide

I found this guy’s blog when i was reading about the singleton issues on planet-php. Someone linked this Miško Hevery and his googletach talk about global state. I have watched all the talks Miško made and I think they are amazing. It’s even more exciting for me because not very long ago we started writing unit tests for our software and we came up with problems and questions we couldn’t answer easily. These talks gave us a better understanding of how we should write our software and unit tests.

The Clean Code Talks - “Unit Testing”

The Clean Code Talks - “Inheritance, Polymorphism, & Testing”

The Clean Code Talks - “Global State and Singletons”

The Clean Code Talks - “Don’t Look For Things!”

Enjoy!

, hevery, misko, Testing Hide

Who could have guessed Percona would decide to release their own storage engine named XtraDB for MySQL. It’s a drop in replacement for InnoDB. They are forking a version of InnoDB and applying patches of their own. Not only that they are going to put more effort to it to make it something more than just a small variation of InnoDB. Even now it seems to offer better performance and scalability than InnoDB. It also frees XtraDB from Oracle that did an awesome job creating InnoDB but it seems percona want’s to go to the next level. Happy to see XtraDB will be available for others to modify and submit patches. It’s also interesting to find out Percona will be trying to sponsor future changes of XtraDB through their customers.

It is also nice too see that there are some thoughts to merge XtraDB into Drizzle.

innodb, MySQL, percona, xtradb Hide

While reading planetmysql I’ve found a very interesting article about Top N Sort algorithm. It would be nice to have this implemented in MySQL. There are millions of applications that have sorted and paginated lists of data. Some of those lists are really big. For example company that I work for has a web application with a report that has milions of rows and it has to be sorted and it only shows a few hundred rows in a single page. This would definitely be a great improvement to MySQL.

algorithm, MySQL, sorting Hide