Databases

Written by Major Hayden, a Rackspace employee, this blog is a great read for those of us who are managing a server for clients who have a dedicated or virtual dedicated server (hello MT).

Major covers a lot of ground, but a great start would be Speeding up MySQL, where he offers up a few nuggets that are not usually seen in these types of posts.

Some of you probably recognize the name from his MySQLTuner script, which when run and iterated thru for a few days helps to get your my.cnf tuned up and your server performing well (keeping in mind his hints from the post linked above also helps for server performance :).

37 mySQL tips plus some additional links at the bottom of the page, there's a good chance that most users will find something useful here. Included are links to articles about normalization, tips for merging tables, doing a random select and many more things that may just be useful at some point!

A nice simple writeup about database normalization that includes some links at the end worth following (also see MySQL Database Design). From the article:

Over the years I, like many of you, have had the experience of taking over responsibility for an existing application and its associated schema (sometimes frustratingly woven together as part of a Microsoft Access solution).

I hear ya.

This is being bookmarked for future reference. From the website:

Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes).

Also see: Build a custom search engine with PHP and Implementing Search.