Collectorz.com Forum

Hi all,

Interested in our progress on the new online book database system?

This thread will be a log of our fixes and optimizations.

Enjoy!

Friday October 31:

- Several SQL query optimizations
- Prices were not correctly cached in our database
- National Library Netherlands: the letter "ij" was not handled correctly
- National Library Netherlands: dashes were not stripped from returned ISBNs

Added source:
- National Library Poland

Saturday November 1 and Sunday November 2:

- Several performance optimizations on the database indexes

Monday November 3:

- Books with multiple authors were not handled correctly (only one author was cached and returned)
- Prices were returned into the wrong field (Purchase Price instead of Cover Price)
- Improved results for Author searches on Authors with three-letter first names, e.g. "Dan Brown"
- Optimized caching of Author/Title search results, hopefully reducing server load

Wednesday November 5:

- Added support for Format and Language fields. This data is now also cached in our database and returned to Book Collector 6.

- and the BIG one: we fixed several problems in the way we handle ISBN-13 searches.
We received many reports about problems with ISBN searches and we are confident that today's fixes will resolve most of em (if not all of em).

Friday November 7:

Sven and Dinh have been working on the online database server all day. Here's the result:

- Fixed a bug that resulted in "No Results" for Author/Title searches on the first try, but DID return results on the 2nd try.

- Fixed the Author only search and improved its performance too.

- Fixed several problems with special characters for results that were retrieved from library sources.

- Fixed some problem ISBN search problems on the National Library Netherlands, related to ISBNs with or without dashes.

Monday November 10

- Some performance improvements for both ISBN and Author/Title searches

- Improved results for z3950 library searches by ISBN

Tuesday November 11

Sven and me have been monitoring the performance of the server all day, to find out what makes things so slow now and then.

We were able to implement a couple of optimizations to our queries:

- ISBN searches are faster now, especially if the ISBN was already cached in our database
- Both previewing results and adding from a result are MUCH faster now

We are still working on the performance of Author/Title searches, these are still quite slow.

Also:
The database server will be upgraded to faster hardware this week.
(Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4Ghz) CPU, 1066MHz Front Side Bus, 8 GB RAM)

This will probably solve all performance problems.

However, during the move, while the huge amount of data is being copied to the new machine, the performance may be worse than ever.
Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Wednesday November 12

Added source:
- National Library Spain
(this should dramatically improve search results for spanish books)

- Fixed several ISBN search problems for National Library Netherlands.
- Fixed a bug in our script for National Library Italy that could cause ":" characters in Author names

Thursday November 13

- Fixed: Dewey values did not get returned to Book Collector 6

Friday November 14

Finally!
Our databases (including the BC6 database) have just been moved to shiny new server hardware !

(Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz CPU, 1066MHz Front Side Bus, 8 GB RAM,
running FreeBSD 64-bit, PHP5 & MySQL5)

We have tested everything we could think of and it seems to be up and running A-OK.

And it's FAST!

I'd love to hear your findings (just create a new topic, this one is locked)