Read the original article at Make MySQL clustering work for you

We’ve told you all about MySQL mult-master replication’s limitations. If you write to two masters it is bound to fail for myriad reasons. Now what? Do what the pros do that’s what. A. Don’t write to both masters Using multi-master replication works great as long as you do so in active-passive mode. Never write to [...]

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Read the original article at Transaction isolation breaks when writing two masters

Continuing our discussion of multi-master replication, we hit on five more reasons why writing to two masters aka active-active replication is very dangerous. Click through to the end for multi-master solutions that work with MySQL. Reason 6 – You lose transaction isolation This may sound like a theoretical point to some. But hopefully we can [...]

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Read the original article at 10 reaons active-active is hard and how to solve it

Multi-master replication provides redundant copies of your most important business assets. What’s more it allows applications to scale out, which is perfect for cloud hosting solutions like Amazon Web Services. But when you decide you need to scale your write capacity, you may be considering active-active setup. This is dangerous, messy and prone to failure. [...]

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Read the original article at Don’t Miss Percona Live 2013

The biggest event on the MySQL calendar is the yearly Percona Live and it’s just around the corner. This year you’ll be able to pick from a whopping 110 technical sessions by 90 different speakers from companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Linkedin. Learn what’s happening at the cutting edge of open source database deployments. [...]

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Read the original article at Why your cloud is speeding for a scalability cliff

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Don’t believe me that you’re headed for the cliff? A startup scales up to no avail Towards the end of 2012 I worked with an internet startup in the online education space. Their web application was not unusual, built in PHP and using Linux, Apache & Mysql [...]

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Read the original article at Cloud DBA and Management Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? This is the last of a three part guide to interviewing for a cloud operations position. You can find them here – part one Operations Interview and part two Deployment Interview. Here’s my guide to do just that. 1. Database administration experience Although in some shops [...]

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Read the original article at Crisis Management in the Crosshairs – Sandy

Crisis Management During Sandy

The news this past week has brought endless images of devastation. All metropolitan region, the damage is apparent.

More than once in conversation I’ve commented “That’s similar to what I do.” The response is often one of confusion. So I go on to clarify. Web operations is every bit about disaster recovery and crisis management in the datacenter. If you saw Con Edison down in the trenches you might not know how that power gets to your building, or what all those

Read the original article at Cloud Deployment Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? In part one of the cloud interview guide we covered some basic unix & Linux systems administration skills, and cloud computing and infrastructure concepts. Those are key starting points. You might also want to jump to part 3 cloud dba, architecture and management interview questions.

In this second part, let’s dig into deploying applications in the cloud, and day to

Read the original article at Real Disaster Recovery Lessons from Sandy

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Having just spent the last 24 hours in lower manhattan, while Hurricane Sandy rolled through, it’s offered some first hand lessons on disaster recovery. Watching the city and state officials, Con Edison, first responders and hospitals deal with the disaster brings some salient insights. 1. What are [...]

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Read the original article at Cloud Operations Interview

What does a cloud computing expert need to know? How do you hire a cloud computing expert? Competition for operations & DBAs is fierce, so you’ll want to know how to find the best.

If you’re a systems administrator or ops guy, you may want to prepare for an interview for such a position. Meanwhile, if you’re a director of it or operations, a recruiter or manager in HR, you’ll want to have some idea how to find the right candidate.

Here’s my guide to do just that. You may

Read the original article at AirBNB didn’t have to fail

Today part of Amazon Web Services failed, taking down with it a slew of startups that all run on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure. AirBNB was one of the biggest, but also Heroku, Reddit, Minecraft, Flipboard & Coursera down with it. Its not the first time. What the heck happened, and why should we care?

1. Root Cause

The AWS service allows companies like AirBNB to build web applications, and host them on servers owned and managed by Amazon.

Read the original article at Why do people leave consulting?

As a long time freelancer, it’s a question that’s intrigued me for some time. I do have some theories… First, definitions… I’m not talking about working for a large consulting firm. Although this role may be called “consultant”, my meaning is consultant as sole proprietor, entrepreneur, gun for hire or lone wolf. 1. Make more [...]

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Read the original article at Thoughts on Upcoming MySQL 5.6 Defaults

During Oracle Open World 2012 and the parallel MySQL Connect conference, the new 5.6 version was announced. It’s only release candidate right now, but that means the GA release is just around the corner. With that James Day has posted changes to various of the new parameter defaults. Many of them you may not run [...]

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Read the original article at Anatomy of a Performance Review

A lot of firms come to us with a specific scalability problem. “Our user base is growing rapidly and the website is falling over!” Or they’re selling more widgets, “Our shopping cart is slowing down and we’re seeing users abandon their purchases”. These are real startup growing pains, so what to do?

We like to take a measured approach with these types of challenges, so we thought it would be helpful to run through a hypothetical scenario and see how we work.

Having trouble with scalability? Check out our

Read the original article at 10 ways I avoid trouble in database operations

1. Avoid destructive commands From time to time I’m working with new recruits and bringing them up to speed in operations. The first thing I emphasize is care with destructive commands. What do I mean here? Well there are all sorts of them. SQL commands such as DROP table & DROP database. But also TRUNCATE [...]

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Read the original article at Hiring is a numbers game

On a recent twitter chat (#hfchat) I posted some comments about hiring. Some folks were complaining that they had applied to various jobs, and not heard back.

I commented…

In today’s market, there are hundreds of job applicants for every position. Sad to say, but that means things become a blur after a while. There’s less chance to sift each candidate and find out who they really are or what they really know. It’s more about keywords, and buzzwords if you must, to get your

Read the original article at Why you should attend Percona Live 2012

What I loved about Percona Live 2011 Last year I was excited to go to Percona Live for the first time in NYC. I arrived just in time to hear Harrison Fisk from Facebook speak about some of the awesome tweaks they’re running with MySQL there. It’s not everyday that you get to hear from [...]

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Read the original article at Upcoming for Scalable Startups

Just back from the Labor Day holiday, and ready to dive back in.

I thought this would be a great time to outline some of our upcoming topics so here goes…

1. Why Oracle usability sucks

- a rant about Oracle’s weak points

In the meantime take a peek at our piece on why we wrote the book on Oracle & Open Source. We ruminate on trends in the datacenter and take a stab at Oracle’s future.

2. Why relational databases don’t scale

- Is there any such thing as automatic scalability?
- What blocks scalability?
- Are NoSQL databases magic?

Also one of our articles that went viral –

Read the original article at 31 Essential Blogs for Startups & Scalability

So many blogs, so little time! Here’s our list of the best we’ve found. Currently our favorite reader is Pulse pictured left. Starting to play around with flipboard too.

Nuts & Bolts Technical

Slashdot
One of the original tech blogs, that still covers lots of breaking news, and difficult topics. Very technical, with probing commentary. Beware the actual comments though, as they’re often full of immature

Read the original article at 5 Things You Overlooked with MySQL Dumps

1. Point In Time Recovery If you’ve never done point in time recovery, it’s time to take a second look. With a standard mysqldump you restore your database to the time when the backup happened. Only do them once a day, then you can lose as much as 24 hours of data. Enter point-in-time recovery, [...]

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Read the original article at Beware the sales wolf in sheep suits

Recently a colleague called me up to get my opinion. Therein lies the eternal drama in organizations, the push & pull between dollars and technology best practices. We had a similar experience with a MySQL deployment, and solution framed by Oracle sales. Battle lines are drawn Clearly the battle lines are drawn now. Between director [...]

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Read the original article at Juggling apples & oranges in the datacenter

In which a few choice words become one serious accident… The Backstory More than five years ago now, I worked for a shop in the business of news & information around the legal and real estate sectors. It was a fairly large organization with a number of Oracle and MySQL backed applications. The whole place [...]

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Read the original article at Opportunity a day – career risk at bay

Free Agent. Stress Test. Avoid Sameness

As the globalization juggernaut rolls on, it continues to create more Detroits. Skills and perspectives quickly become obsolete.

What to do in the face of such change?

So there’s your quick answer. Get the book if you want more!

Some related material: why is it so hard to find a mysql dba?.

Read the original article at Sometimes… let things break a little

Have you ever started a new project, just into it you realize that maybe there aren’t technical problems to solve? It starts to dawn on you the real crux of the problem boils down to people & processes?

It’s happened to me on a number of occasions, but once in particular really stands out for me.

I was working for a firm in the education space, in particular around test preparations.

Asked to automate a publish process

The environment had a mix of relational databases, from SQL*Server to MySQL for some applications. The web facing database

Read the original article at Oracle DBAs… You Know You Want MySQL!

If you’re an Oracle DBA or developer and considering migrating an application over to MySQL you probably have a lot of questions. Here’s a five minute summary of what you should know. Looking to hire a top flight MySQL DBA? Check out our MySQL interview guide. What is truly delicious o a command line that’s [...]

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Read the original article at Why I Wrote the Book – Oracle and Open Source

Back in the late 90′s New York City was deep in the dot-com boom. Silicon Alley was being born, and a thousand internet startups were sprouting. Everyone was hiring, it was an exciting time to work in technology!

Trend Spotting Circa 2000

As an independent consultant, I had the opportunity to work at quite a few startups. The technology stack was identical at almost all of them. Sun Microsystems hardware, Apache webservers, and Oracle on the backend. The database was always the sticking point, and developers

Read the original article at A CTO Must Never Do This…

A couple years back I was contacted to look at a very strange problem.

The firm ran flash sales. An email goes out at noon, the website traffic explodes for a couple of hours, then settles back down to a trickle.

Of course you might imagine where this is going. During that peak, the MySQL database was brought to its knees. I was asked to do analysis during this peak load, and identify and fix problems. Make it go faster, please!

First day on the job I’m working with a team of outsourced DBAs. I was also working

Read the original article at Accidental DBA’s Guide to MySQL Management

So you’ve been tasked with managing the MySQL databases in your environment, but you’re not sure where to start.  Here’s the quick & dirty guide. Oh yeah, and for those who love our stuff, take a look to your right. See that subscribe button? Grab our newsletter!

1. Installation

The “yum” tool is your friend.  If you’re using debian, you’ll use apt-get but it’s very similar. You can do a “yum list” to see what packages are available. We prefer to use the Percona distribution of

Read the original article at The Art of Resistance

Sometimes, you have to be the bad guy. Be resistant to change. Here’s a story about how stubbornness pays off. As we’ve written about before A 4 letter word divides Dev & Ops.

I had one experience working as the primary MySQL DBA for an internet startup. Turns out they had Oracle for some applications too. And another DBA just to handle the Oracle stuff.

So it came time for Oracle guy to go on vacation. Suddenly these Oracle systems landed on my shoulders. We reviewed

Read the original article at Road War Story – Hacking Inflight Solutions

The 2am phone call

Last summer I got my call from the president at 2am.  Actually it was my former boss at Hollywood Reporter.  I had worked there three months previous, and they had since hired an outsourced DBA solution.  Big outsource, big chops.  And big fail.

12 hours to liftoff

I was scrambling to pack my luggage to go on summer vacation.  I was bound for SF at the moment and my flight was leaving in the morning.  I was trying to wrap up loose ends and my