Read the original article at RDS or MySQL – Ten Use Cases

Amazon’s Relational Database Service is based on MySQL under the hood.  So many colleagues and clients ask me – should I go with RDS or MySQL? As with every technology question, the answer is – it depends.

Here are some scenarios to help you decide.

A: This setup is common if you’re using Amazon’s VPC or Virtual Private Cloud.  With a router dropped into your datacenter, VPC allows you to extend and spinup virtual instances from Amazon as if they’re sitting in your own existing datacenter.  Great stuff, but you won’t be able to replicate from your existing

Read the original article at What Recession? – New York Tech Hiring Frenzy

According to Crains, New York is digital jobs central.  ZocDoc, Thrillist, Foursquare and 10gen are just a few of the hot shots located at 568 Broadway, a tech hub in Soho.  Each of these firms is looking to double their headcount in the coming year.  Not bad considering the rough shape much of the economy is in.

Don’t Forget the Big Boys

Let’s not forget the huge tech firms that are also on a hiring binge,  Google, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter & Skype are all hiring.  Bloomberg Businessweek describes it

Read the original article at Best of Guide – Highlights of Our Popular Content

We cherry pick the top 5 most popular posts of various topics we’ve covered in recent months.

• 5 Things Toxic to Scalability

We use a broad brush to highlight the biggest no-nos in web application scalability.

• 5 Ways to Boost Scalability for MySQL

We dig into scalability, steering to the richest areas to focus on.

• 8 Best Practices for Deploying MySQL

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Building your business

In the last two posts on how to build a successful consulting business I shared advice and tips on closing deals and managing and completing your engagements.

This post will look at where to focus your efforts in order to sustain your consulting business, and build skills.

Focus on your subject matter expertise

Being a subject matter expert takes years of education, and professional experience to build. It’s your

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Managing & Completing Engagements

This is the second in a series of three articles on Consulting Essentials.
Read the previous post, Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Communicating well and knowing when to step in or stand back is the linchpin of successful consulting.
Some people have natural charm. If you’re one of these people you’ll find consulting is definitely for you. You’ll use that skill all the time as each new client brings a half dozen or a dozen new people to interact with.

If it doesn’t come easily, practice practice practice. Try to get out of your own head

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Over the years, a lot of people have approached me asking how to become a tech consultant. What do I need to do to get started? How can I take my first step?

I also hear from managers and CEOs that have asked how I got my start, and how I keep the business running. What lessons from consulting can be applied to startups and small businesses? Having worked independently for many years I’ve built up my own cache of strategies and methods which I hope can be helpful to anyone looking to strike it out on their own.

This

Read the original article at Tyranny of a Google vote

Image by Hajo de Reijger, politicallyillustrated.com

For the past year I’ve been seeing headline blogs analyzing the effect of Google’s last algorithm update, dubbed the Panda. There was much talk of unfair relegation from the first page of Google search results, and general indignance by the SEO community.

As with any subject in which I only have cursory knowledge I didn’t think much of it. I thought that as long as I didn’t engage in link-buying and whatever is known as “black hat” tactics, the search engines would be fair. What I didn’t realise with Google was how

Read the original article at Bulletproofing MySQL replication with checksums

Your MySQL replications running well? You might not even know if they aren’t. One of the scariest things about MySQL replication is that it can drift out of sync with the master “silently”. No errors, no warnings.

MySQL’s replication solution evolved as a statement based technology. Instead of sending actual block changes, MySQL just has to log committed transactions, and reapply those on the slave side. This affords a wonderful array of topologies and different uses, but

Read the original article at 5 Ways to fortify MySQL replication

MySQL replication technology is powerful and flexible. But it doesn’t do everything perfectly all the time. You may experience trouble with the slaves falling behind the master, or want to scale horizontally by building new slaves automatically. Or you might need to build a slave without blocking the master database.

All of these goals can be achieved using some powerful tools. Here’s a quick guide to those tools and how to use them.

Something we’re sure you need to do quite often is to build new slaves. You can

Read the original article at Easy MySQL replication with hotbackups

Setting up replication in MySQL is something we need to do quite often. Slaves die, replication fails, or tables and data get out of sync. Whenever we build a slave, we must start with a snapshot of all the data from the master database.

MySQLdump is the tried and true method of doing this, however it requires that we lock all the tables in the database. If we’re dumping a large database, this could be a significant period, where no writing can happen to our database for the duration of the backup. For many environments read-only is

Read the original article at Autoscaling MySQL on Amazon EC2

Autoscaling your webserver tier is typically straightforward. Image your apache server with source code or without, then sync down files from S3 upon spinup. Roll that image into the autoscale configuration and you’re all set.


With the database tier though, things can be a bit tricky. The typical configuration we see is to have a single master database where your application writes. But scaling out or horizontally on Amazon EC2 should be as easy as adding more slaves, right? Why not automate that process?

Below we’ve set out to answer some of the

Read the original article at Oracle to MySQL – prepare to bushwhack through the open source jungle

I was recently approached by a healthcare company for advice on suitable database solutions capable of executing its new initiative. The company was primarily an Oracle shop so naturally, they began by shopping for possible Oracle solutions.

The CTO relayed his conversation with the Oracle sales rep, who at first recommended an Oracle solution that, expensive as it may have been, ultimately aligned with the company’s existing technology and experience. Unfortunately this didn’t match their budget and so predictably, the Oracle sales rep whipped out a MySQL-based solution as an

Read the original article at A handy guide for PHP and MongoDB Web Development

What makes a beginner’s guide handy is when it speaks to your intuition. It anticipates the burning questions that follow from a newbie trying to grasp new concepts and it quickly answers them. PHP and MongoDB Web Development – Beginner’s Guide is one such guide.

I hadn’t heard of Packt Publishing or Rubayeet Islam before picking up this title and I must say I’m impressed. Based in Birmingham, with offices in Mumbai, part of Packt’s

Read the original article at Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 2)

Continuing from our Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1) here are five more questions that test a MySQL DBA’s knowledge, with two that will help suss out some personality traits.

Disk performance should be an ever present concern to a DBA.  So although they don’t need to be a storage specialist, they should have a working knowledge.  Ask them about RAID versions, mirroring versus striping, and so forth.  Mirroring combines two disks as a unit.  Every write is duplicated on both disks.  If you lose one disk, you have an immediate copy.  Like a tandem truck that has spare tires running in parallel.

Read the original article at Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1)

MySQL DBAs are in greater demand now than they’ve ever been. While some firms are losing the fight for talent, promising startups with a progressive bent are getting first dibs with the best applicants. Whatever the case, interviewing for a MySQL DBA is a skill in itself so I thought I’d share a guide of top MySQL DBA interview questions to help with your screening process.
It’s long and detailed with some background to give context so I will be publishing this in two parts.

Maureen O’Gara, self-described as “the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years”, has written an article about Drizzle at Rackspace for one of Sys-con’s online zines called Cloud Computing Journal, of which she is an editor.

I tried commenting on Maureen’s article on their website, but the login system is apparently borked, at least for registered users who use OpenID, which it wants to still have a separate user ID and login. Note to sys-con.com: OpenID is designed so that users don’t have to remember yet another login for your website.

Besides having little patience for content-sparse websites that simply provide an online

Dear Lazy Web,

What should the result of the SELECT be below? Assume InnoDB for all storage engines.

CREATE TABLE t1 (a INT, b INT);
INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (1,1),(1,2);
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t2 (a INT, b INT, PRIMARY KEY (a));
BEGIN;
INSERT INTO t2 VALUES (100,100);
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE IF NOT EXISTS t2 (PRIMARY KEY (a)) SELECT * FROM t1;
 
# The above statement will correctly produce an ERROR 23000: Duplicate entry '1' FOR KEY 'PRIMARY'
# What should the below RESULT be?
 
SELECT * FROM t2;
COMMIT;