December 10, 2013 By Severalnines

As a follow-up to the Webinar on Zero Downtime Schema Changes in Galera Cluster, we’ll now walk you through the detailed steps on how to update your schema. The two methods (TOI and RSU) have both their pros and cons, and given parameters like table size, indexes, key_buffer_size, disk speed, etc., it is possible to estimate the time taken for the schema to be upgraded. Also, please note that a schema change is non-transactional so it would not be possible to rollback the DDL if it fails midway. Therefore, it is always recommended to test the schema changes and ensure you have recoverable backups before performing this on your production clusters. 

This post examines the way DDL changes are propagated in Galera, and outlines the steps to upgrade the …

November 14, 2013 By Severalnines

Database schema changes are usually not popular among DBAs or sysadmins, not when you are operating a cluster and cannot afford to switch off the service during a maintenance window. There are different ways to perform schema changes, some procedures being more complicated than others. We invited Seppo from the Codership team to tell us about the options. If you’d like to learn more, please register for our new webinar.

Webinar: Galera Cluster Best Practices - Zero Downtime Schema Changes

Tuesday, December 3rd 2013

Register now - Europe/MEA/APAC

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From time to time we have to work with live environments and production databases. For some of us this is day-to-day job. And most of the time cost of a mistake is way higher than expected improvement especially on the databases. Because issue on the database side will affect everything else.

I heard enough war stories about ruined productions and can imagine well enough speed of DROP DATABASE command replicating across the cluster. So I’m scared to make changes in production. The more loss expected if things go wrong the more I’m going to be scared planning every change. But I still love to make improvements so the only question is how to make them safer.

This post is not intended to be a guide or best practices on how to avoid issues at all, it’s more invitation to discussion that started between me and @randomsurfer in twitter on how to avoid production failures. …

As a leader of a technical operations team I often have to work on technical operations engineer hiring. This process involves a lot of interviews with candidates and during those interviews along with many challenging practical questions I really love to ask questions like “What are the most important resources you think an Operations Engineer should follow?”, “What books in your opinion are must-read for a techops engineer?” or “Who are your personal heroes in IT community?”. Those questions often give me a lot of information about candidates, their experience, who they are looking up to in the community, what they are interested in, and if they are actively working on improving their professional level.

Recently, one of the candidates asked me to share my lists with him and I thought this information could be valuable to other people so I have decided to share it here on my blog.

Must-Read Books List

First …

I’ve posted slides for my Velocity talk on VividCortex’s blog. The talk explained how we use exponentially weighted moving statistics to generate a meta-metric of abnormality for the time-series metrics measured from MySQL. That’s kind of a mouthful. Maybe you had to be there :-)

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 day operations skills. There’s a lot of material here. We …

When your backup script is running for too long it sometimes causes the second backup script starting at the time when previous backup is still running. This increasing pressure on the database, makes server slower, could start chain of backup processes and in some cases may break backup integrity.

Simplest solution is to avoid this undesired situation by adding locking to your backup script and prevent script to start second time when it’s already running.

Here is working sample. You will need to replace “sleep 10″ string with actual backup script call:

#!/bin/bash

LOCK_NAME="/tmp/my.lock"
if [[ -e $LOCK_NAME ]] ; then
        echo "re-entry, exiting"
        exit 1
fi

### Placing lock file
touch $LOCK_NAME
echo -n "Started..."

### Performing required work
sleep 10

### Removing lock
rm -f $LOCK_NAME

echo "Done."

It works perfectly most of the times. Problem is that you could still theoretically run two …

If you ever get an error with MySQL client library:

php: error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.16: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

while using Percona MySQL Server 5.5 just go ahead and install Percona-Server-shared-compat package from Percona Repo:

yum install Percona-Server-shared-compat

Eric Ries' lean movement is picking up steam and is really extending agile software development to the wider organisation. Its interesting to see over time how some organisations have changed in a more competitive market in recent times. REA Group, the company I work for, have made some significant changes over the past few years including:

• Adopted the agile software delivery process throughout IT replacing the traditional waterfall method
• Slided and diced 'development / delivery' resources in different ways to provide accountability to the segment of the business they are working on
• Adopted a more collaborative approach between IT Operations and IT development/delivery

The traditional That being said, there are many companies that arrange teams like

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Read the original article at How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck

Strip by Randall Munroe; xkcd.com

First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.

It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative coding while the guys in operations, those who deploy the code, constantly cross their fingers in the hope that application changes won’t tilt the machine. And when you’re woken up at 4am to deal with an outage or your sluggish site is costing millions in losses, the blame game and finger-pointing starts.

If you manage a startup …