Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Full Text Search for Business and Place Finder


Working on a website called Near Me and creating full text search index which allow searches by distance using latitude and longitude. Similar to Google Places but based on distance rather than rating.

It is interesting how SQL Server is able to handle spatial indexes with full text search but having millions of records in the table does not make it easy so i decided to give Lucene a try, but Lucene.Net is very slow unless you keep the data in memory.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

latest project on pets dogs and puppies

The last database i designed as a freelance database administrator is for dogs and puppy adoption site with all the fun stuff about dogs. I own two German sheperd dogs myself which are really cool to play with every evening.

The learning part about this project while working on puppies for sale website was the amount of text stored in the database. The huge amount of text data related to breed information facts and description. The existing developer who initially designed the database used varchar MAX for almost all the fields. Now the main part for me was to track all the data and see if i can fix some of this cowboy style database design.

Looks like the client is happy and all of the sudden site performance have increased, seperation of data and making table size small can really help which many front end developers does not understand specially when every query is select * from table. :)

Thursday, April 9, 2009

MySQL Hosting

MySQL is one of the most popular open source database system available for free (community edition). One of the biggest benefit of MySQL compared to other open source / free database systems is the availablity on all major operating system. Many companies are moving to MySQL server and demand of MySQL Hosting is increasing each day. There are several hosting providers out there offering cheap to expensive hosting for php and mysql but the reliability is the biggest concern.
I will recomment www.mysqlhosting.us for mysql hosting, only problem with them is that they offer windows based mysql hosting and no web hosting. The biggest benefit is free mysql database administration services.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

SQL Server Hosting

If you are using SQL Server in hosting enviorment then like all other web site owners you are looking for a better hosting company. There are many hosting companies out there which can provide you with database hosting in shared and dedicated enviorment but they lack expertise in sql server database administration and management.

In my recent research i found one sql server hosting provider company which also provides database administration services including design, monitoring and performance tunning. They do not support all features but hardly any small to medium size business is using all sql server features.

Monday, October 27, 2008

social networking and dating

The sudden popup of all these new social networking and dating sites is crazy, now even for particular ethnic group, city or state.

All these sites are collecting more data then any other corporate collects on it's customers. The site My Life, Match.com, Arab Dating, eharmony and Indian Pakistani Dating and other social networking sites owned by large companies like google the orkut.

Is there are any end to it, these sites are from dating to friendship to social networking like each and every thing you can do after signup. :)

the fun of horoscopes

So recently i optimized a database for an astrology website... huh ? wow it was a strange experience i am not a big believer of horoscope and astrology but i did bought two services from them. Just to be in good faith and future business :)

My experience did change my mind a little it, the dates were very close. Now i wonder how this thing work. But hey it was fun and i will say not a waste of money at all. :)

Monday, December 10, 2007

Youtube and SQL Server

A friend of mine is creating few computer educational videos to post on Youtube, its kind of cool. There are many free video sites which can be used to educate users. If we check Google there are many online searches for education videos specially related to computers and helping others is always a good thing.