I have a Django project where I was utilizing bulk_create to load a fairly large dataset, and this was some times resulting in the error MySQL server has gone away. Reading though the documentation on this error, https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/gone-away.html I see that one of the possible causes for this is “you send a query to the server that is incorrect or too large” Turns out, I just needed to use the batch_size parameter of bulk_create . In my case, a batch of 56,000 records was triggering the error, so for safety, I switched to using bulk_created(..., batch_size=(10**4)).

I have been using pgAdmin 4 as my GUI tool for interacting with my PostgreSQL database servers. I had noticed the “Application” column, and that it was empty for my Django sessions, and wanted to fill that in with useful context..

I recently switched a Django project utilizing Haystack from Whoosh as the engine to Xapian. The performance significantly improved, but I was left with some deficiencies in the search results — this turned out to be due to the default settings.

Here are the necessary settings to improve the search result quality:

import xapian

HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_FLAGS = (
    xapian.QueryParser.FLAG_PHRASE |
    xapian.QueryParser.FLAG_BOOLEAN |
    xapian.QueryParser.FLAG_LOVEHATE |
    xapian.QueryParser.FLAG_WILDCARD |
    xapian.QueryParser.FLAG_PURE_NOT |
    xapian.QueryParser.FLAG_PARTIAL
)
HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_STEMMING_STRATEGY = 'STEM_ALL'

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine',
        'PATH': root.path('data/xapian')(),
        'FLAGS': HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_FLAGS,
    },
}

Before these settings, I was having problem with queries being apparently case sensitive, at least when using AutoQuery, and failing partial searches. These changes improve case insensitivity and stemming, which still having almost 100x better performance than Whoosh.

Hopefully this helps someone out there looking for solutions.

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