April 2009 Archives

Here are some tips for those of you running #CentOS# who would like to run #SphinxSearch#, an awesome full-text search engine, in SphinxSE mode (that is, inside #MySQL#):

1. Install MySQL 5.1. It supports plugins, so you don't need to recompile the entire thing to have SphinxSE. Since 5.1 is not yet the default in Centos, you can get it from the Remi repository. Read here to setup remi in yum.
   
2. Install/upgrade mysql: "yum --enablerepo=remi install mysql-5.1.34 mysql-devel-5.1.34"
3. I'm following the idea from this page. Get the mysql 5.1 sources that match the version you installed above. Unpack. Copy the sphinx-x.x.x/mysqlse directory to mysql-5.1.xx/storage/sphinx.
   
4. In the mysql source directory, run 'sh BUILD/autorun.sh; ./configure; make'.
   
5. Have a coffe.
6. Run 'cp storage/sphinx/.libs/ha_sphinx.* /usr/lib64/mysql/plugin'. Your plugin directory may not be this one, check it in my.cnf
7. From mysql, as a superuser, run "INSTALL PLUGIN sphinx SONAME 'ha_sphinx.so';"

If you are primarily a developer, like me, chances are your design skills suck. They may be functional, they may even be nice every now and them, but people look at your sites and they say, "Yeah, the design is not good," or "the idea rocks, the layout sucks," or my personal favorite: "I like it, but it looks too square."
Since you've studied algorithms, half a dozen programming languages, the two thousand, three hundred and eighty six web standards (and counting), databases, system administration, and probably business management and accounting (if you are opening a #startup#), why not study design? Oh, yeah, you've googled for "design howto" and nothing useful came up. So here are a couple books to help.

• "#The non-designer's design book#", by #Robin Williams (writer)#. This is a wonderful book, clear, concise, simple. It's not about web design (but it talks about it a little bit) and reading it will change the way you see any material with words on it. Read it.
  
• "#Don't make me think#", by #Steve Krug#. This is almost a classic about web usability. It is much more practical to web than "non-designer's", but you can enjoy it much more if you have read "non-designer's" first.

Good reading.

So you need to backup your #MySQL# database. Easy. Ah, you don't want to bring your site down while you're doing the backup? Hard.
It's amazing that a product as widely used as MySQL has been so lacking in a fundamental feature such as backups (well, perhaps people really don't backup). It's true that version 6 will have a BACKUP command, but you don't run alpha releases in production servers.
The most common solutions for hot backups in MySQL are using replication, LVM and mysqldump. Now there's a new tool called mydumper. It's quite new and it doesn't support MyISAM yet, but it's worth checking out. It's quite faster than mysqldump: http://dammit.lt/2009/02/03/mydumper/.