There’s an Event Apart happening in New Orleans this week, and one of the most interesting presentations is by Aarron Walter titled Findability Bliss Through Web Standards. Required reading, with no exceptions!

I love the presentation style, and am sad I wasn’t present to see Aarron’s talk in person.

How’s that for a mouthful of a post title?

Oracle has recently released an updated InnoDB driver for MySQL, which has some pretty interesting features beyond the basic obvious-must-haves-for-clean-data features. As Alexey Kovyrin writes:

These interesting performance results obviously come from the fact that in addition to index pages compression (by default it is trying to compress 16kb pages down to 8kb) new innodb plugin performs TEXT/BLOB/VARCHAR fields compression off-page so every large TEXT field could become as small as a few bytes if its compression ratio is good. One thing I’d like to mention here that in our case we’ve actually tried a few possible options for compressed page sizes: 1k, 4k and 8k. Results were not so different because most of our data was in TEXT fields and there weren’t many other indexes aside from PRIMARY, but for some other cases it could make sense to try other page sizes (not default 8k) to make data set smaller.

Think about that for a second. If you’re chugging around a big fat database and have random reads on tables that have BLOB columns then you’re in for a big treat.