Talk Announcement: MySQL and Search at Craigslist (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I recently learned that my talk has been accepted for the 2009 MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. It is currently scheduled for Tuesday the 21st and titled MySQL and Search at Craigslist.

Here's the abstract (which I've promised to expand upon soon):

Millions of people search for things every day on craigslist: tickets, cars, garage sales, jobs, events, and so on.

This talk will look at the recent evolution of database and search architecture at Craigslist, including performance, caching, partitioning, and other tweaks. We'll pay special attention to the unique challenges of doing this for a large data set that has an especially high churn rate (new posts, edits, and deletes).

And we strive to do this using as little hardware and power as possible.

If you're coming to the conference, drop by and harass me. :-)

If you're not sure check out the full schedule--there's a lot of good stuff packed into the conference already and a lot of talks are still not even posted.

Posted by jzawodn at December 19, 2008 07:54 AM

Reader Comments

# Guillaume Theoret said:

Have you looked into Sphinx search? I recently ported all our heaviest searches ("online now" + "close to me" searches) to Sphinx and it's helping both load and responsiveness tremendously.

http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

on December 19, 2008 08:14 AM

# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Yup. We're using it now. :-) That'll definitely be in the talk.

on December 19, 2008 08:36 AM

# Julian Martinez said:

Why did Craigslist take so long to start using indexing tools such as sphinx, etc?

on December 19, 2008 01:36 PM

# Rasmus said:

Can we harass you about the mojibake in your blog entry too?

on December 19, 2008 05:58 PM

# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Since I cut and pasted that from the O'Reilly site, you definitely can!

on December 19, 2008 06:26 PM

# Artem Russakovskii said:

I went to the conference last year and wish you were talking then and not this year (I won a free pass from linuxquestions.org http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-news-59/gratis-2008-mysql-conference-and-expo-conference-pass-627377/page4.html#post3095155). Those conferences are so expensive if your work doesn't sponsor you...

Kick ass and make Sheeri take a video of you and post it!

on December 19, 2008 09:28 PM

# Jonathan Disher said:

I'm definitely interested. I'll have to see if I can convince the new boss to send me this year.

on December 20, 2008 01:11 AM

# MichalT said:

It would be great if you made a video of the talk available (or slides + audio if that's easier).

on December 22, 2008 05:09 PM

# LeeRickey said:

on December 30, 2008 01:30 AM

# Robert Gentel said:

I've been considering using Sphinx or Lucene for http://able2know.org

Anyone have experience with both? In our case we'd be searching around 4 million documents (from mysql).

on January 24, 2009 02:39 AM

# Deepak said:

@Guillaume Theoret:
We have been trying to implement sphinx search. I am unable to understand the concepts, the logic ,like i do about full text search. Also, I have been unable to find anything of help when i googled it. Could you kindly help me ?
Thank you

on April 12, 2009 01:33 PM

# ivy200949 said:

good article , I agree with it

on June 7, 2009 08:24 PM

# alicia8522 said:

A nice site with fantastic articles.

on August 3, 2009 09:52 AM

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