I rarely use MySQL Fulltext indexes. Their performance is just not good enough, so often its better to just stick with "LIKE" or move to something else like Sphinx, Lucene etc. The only nice thing about them is the ability to compute a match "rank". Well anyways I had to write a new search plugin for a project that is based around MySQL Fulltext indexes and a match rank and all as well .. except that for some reasons some words just would not produce any results. As I was trying to find a pattern I finally noticed that in my test data some words were used in most rows and exactly those were not matching. Obviously it makes sense to exclude automatically any words that have a very high hit ratio. And indeed the documentation states that by default all words with a hit ratio of over 50% are excluded. Doh!

Two days after having finally settled on a namespace separator, having read all of the big threads on reddit and slashdot, countless blogs, hate mail send to my private email, hate mail to internals, whining on IRC, I still feel good about the choice we made. Very very very few of the critics even understand the problems. Even less are able to formulate their concerns in a manner worth answering. So yup, none of the things people whine and moan about that could have been done instead make me reconsider.

Thankfully it's just me and not the rest of PHP internals. So today we had an IRC meeting to discuss namespaces in PHP. We came to a final decision replacing the current double colon separator with a backslash to solve ambiguity issues with the current syntax. So far there has not been much of a reaction on list, except for a post which mentioned concerns related to the fact that backslash is currently used for escaping, but which was quickly responded by Greg to point out that yes we were aware of this, but it is not an issue if you know how to use the backslash properly in double quote strings.

A few weeks ago I got a copy of "High Performance MySQL" (from now on referred to as HPM) and just the other day they also send me "Refactoring SQL Applications" (aka "RSA"). Actually I had a copy of HPM at the office already, but its nice to have my own, seeing that its already severely beating up from having to live in my backup. Good to have a neat copy for the company book shelve. I have gotten to chapter 4. So far there has not been all that much earth shattering, but considering the hours I spend reading posts on planetmysql, I guess its not a huge surprise. But at the same time there is also nothing I feel is missing, so in the sense this book fulfills my expectations 100%: its a well written summary of advanced techniques that people have found in the trenches. And yes of course I did learn a few things still.

This blog is about OurDelta, my visit to PGDay (and resulting quest to search for a good nntp reader for OSX) and my long term search for a good set of bluetooth stereo headsets. So lets start with OurDelta. The other day Arjen pokes me about OurDelta. The idea is to offer a place for distribution of all those tasty MySQL patches that float around the web (like from Mark, the Google guys etc.), that simply do not fit in MySQL's research schedule. Obviously this is awesome. There are packages for all sorts of distros (I am sure Windows will come one of these days too), which takes away some of the scaryness for people not comfortable with building things themselves. Moreover you know that there are other people that are using the same binaries and I guess one of the key things that OurDelta could build is a better way to communicate about success and failure when using some of these patches.