Magento MySQL Optimisation

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Benjamin

We’ve got a fairly vast experience of MySQL clusters – and Percona have worked with us on a number of occasions when pushing the boundaries of complex configurations. Can Magento natively handle read-only slaves Magento is natively capable of splitting off reads/writes to different database servers (with the exception of a few broken releases, eg. EE 1.11) – allowing you to offset select load to an additional (or more) server(s); and forwarding all the update/write queries to a single master. When should I do it This is a more appropriate question. With dedicated Magento operating systems like MageStack – it is becoming more common for in-built server side advanced caching techniques to be available and easily used (such as Varnish front end caching and Redis back end caching). Historically, Magento has never been bound by MySQL – but rather PHP. But as Varnish and Full Page Caching (FPC) are used … Continue reading →

Its that time of year again, we’re closed for Christmas

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Benjamin

Another year has passed and we’ll soon be saying the end to 2012 and hello to 2013 – but you’ll have to do it without us, well, at least until we re-open on January 7th 2013. Our Manchester office will be shut from 21st December 2012 until 7th January 2013. Team members will still be checking their respective and common email inbox’s – but only on a semi-regular basis. The team here at Sonassi wants to thank all our customers for making our 2012 so brilliant – and we look forward to continuing being the best Magento agency in the UK during the years to come. Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Decorating our Dock Office

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Benjamin

After 3 successful years of growth, the time came for us to move locations. So we said farewell to our Regus office in Exchange Quay and said hello to the Dock Office, Salford Quays. We had toured many, many sites in Manchester and kept seeing the recurring theme of “Chrome & Glass” Regus-esque style serviced offices – but we were looking for something with a bit of history and a lot of character. Salford Quays isn’t a typical location for character, but is an ideal location for the team – and only a stones throw from Media City. The Dock Office The Dock Office sits beside Trafford Road in Salford. It is a Grade II listed building, designed by Harry Fairhurst and Son, was built in 1925. Beside the building is the former gateway, also by Fairhurst, that once provided access to the docks. The words “Manchester Docks” once ran … Continue reading →

Our Magento Git Guide and Work Flow

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Benjamin

Introduction We have long been advocates of using SVN – but times have changed and so has the style of the way we work – which is what makes Git such an appealing choice for us. So if you’re coming from SVN too, some things worth knowing are: Repositories are de-centralised – With SVN, you have 1 master repository in a central location and everything is checked in/out of this location; with Git, its different. Each copy of the project tree (ie. your working copy) has its own repository – the .git sub-directory of the project tree root. Revisions are no longer decimal numbers – With SVN, your revisions are numbered sequentially with an integer. Due to the distributed nature of Git, and its potential to scaling to hundreds of thousands of revisions, the revisions are identified by a SHA1 hash. You can still short-cut your way through the tree … Continue reading →

Quicker Dumping of a Magento MySQL Database for Branching

Posted on July 28, 2012 by Benjamin

Any experienced Magento developer will certainly have felt the pain of dumping a multi-gigabyte MySQL database for a Magento store. Which is certainly a tedious process when you want to make a quick branch or rapidly update your staging environment. We’re big advocates of branch often and merge often – but this also means updating the DB relatively frequently too (if there has been DB changes on master/trunk). Usually, its just an excuse to go get a fresh cup of coffee whilst you while away the 2 minutes it will take to dump and however long it then takes to re-import into a new DB. But, unfortunately, there is only so much coffee we should be drinking in the day, so speeding up this process is a must. Typically, a staging or development branch, doesn’t actually required all the data the live site has (sales_quotes, logs, reports, dataflow history), so … Continue reading →