Hello there, it’s me again, with another blog about a DBA situation that a typical Linux Administrator may find themselves in.

In this blog, i’m going to review a recent MySQL upgrade I have done on one of the systems I am involved in administering. This is a real world example of an upgrade project, and hopefully when we’re done, there may even be an overall performance boost.

There are several reasons to perform upgrades (of any kind), for me an important one is to keep current for security and bug fixes, but general performance improvements and new features are always welcome as well.

This system is running Bacula, an open source enterprise backup system. In this particular case Bacula is configured to store data in a MySQL database. The data stored include status reports, backup content lists, lists of all the files on all the systems, schedules and other related information. While everything has been …

My colleague Mike Hamrick, who I'm very fortunate to work with, made a presentation on some cool things you can do with top: http://tinyurl.com/48pmu83. These are some great tips that every MySQL DBA or developer should watch!

I found I never published this post as it was sitting in my drafts few months now — it was written in 13th February, 2010. I’m publishing it without any changes.

I learn therefore I am!

I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed a great post by Chen Shapira — Deliberate Practice. That’s reminded me about another aspect of learning that I didn’t mention — learning is a continuous process.

There are two aspects…

• No matter how good I am and how much I know, my knowledge and expertize become outdated relatively quickly these days unless I keep up with the new stuff. Unfortunately, there is so much new …

A MySQL user group member saw that I use Poderosa as my ssh-on-Windows tool, and asked why I did not use PuTTY. My response was that I like having tabbed windows and hate having to keep opening another PuTTY program every time I want to open another connection. With Poderosa I can open a new connection with Alt-N, and I can even connect directly to Cygwin with an icon.

But Poderosa is not the tool I wanted to mention….Another user group member mentioned PuTTY Connection Manager. It wraps around PuTTY and gets the existing saved connections, makes a nicely tabbed browsing window where you can open sessions by double-clicking the connections, which are now listed on the right-hand side.

See screenshot below:

I have not played with …

The Beacon Pattern:
- This is a “Get out of the business” pattern
- Identify an oft-occurring and annoying task
- Automate and document it to the point of being able to hand it off to someone far less technical

Example:
- System admins were being put in charge of scheduling rooms in the building
- They wrote a PHP web application to help them automate the task
- They refined the app, documented how to use it, and handed it off to a secretary
- They have to maintain the app, but it’s far less work.

The Community Pattern:

- Prior to launch of a new service, create user documentation for it.
- Point a few early adopters at the documentation and see if they can use the service with minimal support
- Use feedback to improve documentation, and the service
- Upon launch, create a mailing list, forum, IRC channel, or Jabber chat room and ask early …

I am attending the Professional IT Community Conference – it is put on by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), and is a 2-day community conference. There are technical and “soft” topics — the audience is system administrators. While technical topics such as Essential IPv6 for Linux Administrators are not essential for my job, many of the “soft” topics are directly applicable and relevant to DBAs too. (I am speaking on How to Stop Hating MySQL tomorrow.)

So I am in Seeking Senior and Beyond: The Tech Skills That Get You Promoted. The first part talks about the definition of what it …

I guess that it’s time for the 3rd annual “Ravelry Runs On” roundup. The last two were in March 2008 and March 2009.

This year, our traffic increased by 50% to 5,000,000 page views and 15 million Rails requests per day. We made very few changes to our architecture in 2009 but we did add a new master database server after our working set of data outgrew our memory and IO capacity.

This summary is more detailed then the last two and I’ve broken it up into rough sections.

Physical Network

We own our own servers and colocate then in a datacenter here in Boston. The datacenter provides us with a cooled half cabinet, redundant power, and a blend of premium (Internap, Savvis) bandwidth. We do the rest.

I use …

This is a little story of a little bug. This gremlin suddenly appeared in a CGI.PM web-based application I work with. To make a long story short, an email was coming out something like this . . . 

389939
Subject:Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins Description:389939 #389939: TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

 . . . when it should have been some thing like this:

Subject: TPDD Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins

TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

After about an hour tracking things back, my team and I narrowed it down to this line of code:

$self->send_TXT_email(CGI::param("rep_no"),$rep_object,
                     $subject,$user_ref);

We scratched our respective heads on this for a while, because for user type ‘A’, it worked fine; but for user type ‘B’, it did not. And …

That’s right — get your free 10-day trial! All the information I know is here:

http://bit.ly/37E9ld

But the basics are: No access to Rough Cuts or Downloads, for new subscribers only. It’s one of those “sign up and if you do not cancel after 10 days, we bill you” — and at $42.99 a month, that’s not a mistake you want to make. Must sign up by Nov. 24th.

To sign up now: https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/tryitfree

I was asked to send this information along, so I am…Now’s your chance to skim High Performance MySQL, among other high quality books!

We just had a booboo in one of our internal systems, causing it to not come up properly on reboot. The actual mishap occurred several weeks ago (simple case of human error) and was in itself a valid change so monitoring didn’t raise any concerns. So, as always, it’s interesting and useful to think about such events and see what we can learn.

Years ago, but for some now still, one objective is to see long uptime for a server, sometimes years. It means the sysadmin is doing everything right, and thus some serious pride is attached to this number. As described only last week in Modern Uptime on the Standalone Sysadmin blog, security patches are a serious issue these days, and so (except if you’re using ksplice sysadmin quality has become more a question of when you …