Category Archives: wikitech

About technology behind Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects

on primary keys

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Domas Mituzas

5.1.46 has this change: Performance: While looking for the shortest index for a covering index scan, the optimizer did not consider the full row length for a clustered primary key, as in InnoDB. Secondary covering indexes will now be preferred, … Continue reading →

Posted in mysql, wikitech | 7 Comments

MySQL versions at Wikipedia

Posted on July 25, 2010 by Domas Mituzas

More of information about how we handle database stuff can be found in some of my talks. Lately I hear people questioning database software choices we made at Wikipedia, and I’d like to point out, that… Wikipedia database infrastructure needs … Continue reading →

Posted in mysql, wikitech | Tagged | 4 Comments

update

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

In past few months I had lots of changes going on – left the Sun/MySQL job, my term on Wikimedia Board of Trustees ended, I joined Facebook and now I got appointed to Wikimedia Advisory Board. This also probably means … Continue reading →

Posted in misc, wikitech | 3 Comments

GDB 7!

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

I wasn’t prepared for this. After spending months playing with GDB development trees I somehow entirely missed that 7.0 release is getting close, and took me more than an hour to spot it. My favorite features are python scripting and … Continue reading →

Posted in mysql, wikitech | Tagged | 1 Comment

Spikes are not fun anymore

Posted on August 20, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

English Wikipedia just scored “three million articles”, so I thought I’d give some more numbers and perspectives :) Four years ago we observed impressive +50% traffic spike on Wikipedia – people came in to read about the new pope. Back … Continue reading →

Posted in wikipedia, wikitech | 3 Comments

Board again (perhaps)

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

Tomorrow voting for Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Election starts – and Yours truly is a candidate. You can find most of my views on various issues in our question pages (I was somewhat boiling when answering the What will … Continue reading →

Posted in wikipedia, wikitech | 2 Comments

embarrassment

Posted on June 26, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

So, we had a major embarrassment last night. It consisted of multiple factors: We don’t have parallelism coordinator for our most cpu-intensive task at Wikipedia, so it can work on same job in ten, hundred, thousand threads across the cluster … Continue reading →

Posted in wikipedia, wikitech | Tagged | 11 Comments

on tools and operating systems

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

Sometimes people ask why do I use MacOSX as my main work platform (isn’t that something to do with beliefs?). My answer is “good foundation with great user interface”. Though that can be treated as “he must like unix kernel … Continue reading →

Posted in mysql, wikitech | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

I loved Encarta

Posted on March 30, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

That happened long before Wikipedia. I loved Encarta. Well, before Encarta, I used to read this thing a lot: But then Encarta arrived and I loved it. It did fit into single CD and didn’t take too much space on … Continue reading →

Posted in wikipedia, wikitech | 4 Comments

I’m a creative commoner

Posted on March 28, 2009 by Domas Mituzas

Lately Creative Commons is becoming very dominant topic in my life. First of all, I see all the people in free culture world holding their breath and waiting for Wikipedia switch to CC license. I’m waiting for that too – … Continue reading →

Posted in misc, wikipedia, wikitech | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments