Hello dear readers and attendees,

This is the post that I will be/ will have been referencing during my presentation to the Seattle Central Community College’s Byte club on Thursday, December 10th at 1500-1630.

I will begin with a bit of an autobio and find out what kind of students we have in attendance. Please feel free to comment if you’d like to keep in touch before or after the presentation. I will discuss some of the bits and pieces of some industry standard platforms which I’ve developed, deployed, maintained, managed, co-operated, administered and replaced. We can discuss some of the patterns that work well in the industry, and some that are a bit harder to tame.

Once we have touched most of the areas of specialization represented at the meeting, I will dive in to an AngularJS demo I am developing in github here:

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MySQL Server 5.7 was released around a month ago, and download numbers show huge interest in upgrading from older MySQL releases. As with any product that is frequently used as core infrastructure in complex systems with numerous interdependencies, major version upgrades of MySQL should be approached with some care. In this post, I will cover […]

We remember when we first started auditing MySQL servers, there were very few tools available.  In one of our early big gigs, we were battling serious performance issues for a client.  At the time, tuning-primer.sh was about the only tool available that could be used to diagnose performance bottlenecks.  Fortunately, with a lot of manual interpolation of the raw data it presented, we were able to find the issue with the server and suggest how to resolve them.  For that we are very thankful.  It was a first step in analyzing MySQL status variables, minimizing the number of formulas to learn and calculate by hand.  Obviously doing it by hand takes forever!

Now fast-forward to today.  Unfortunately, not much has changed.  Many DBAs and developers are still using open source tools such as tuning-primer, mysqltuner.pl, mysqlreport, and so on.  Don’t get the wrong; those tools have …

My job is almost completely reliant upon my ability to perform work in lab of virtual machines. Almost every action plan I write is tested locally. When I need to troubleshoot an issue for a client one of the most common first steps I’ll perform is attempting to recreate the issue in a virtual environment so I can work on it there without the risk of impacting client data.

I believe that having a place to test and grow your skills is an absolute necessity for anyone working in the IT field today regardless of your specialization, even if you’re an IT generalist. But every now and then I hear about individuals who have issues with their virtual machines or with the virtual environment provided by their employer, so I figured this was a good time to share my method of creating a virtual lab. More specifically, one that allows you to do virtual work on a commodity laptop, one that won’t break down if you lose connectivity, one that …

Ever get called out for a MySQL issue only to realize that there was no issue?  It was a false alarm from the monitor.  We sure have and it’s frustrating, especially at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning!

Many DBAs work in an environment where there is some sort of first level support that gets assigned tickets first.  Unfortunately, many of the times these groups are, shall we say, less than skilled in MySQL.  As a result, they quickly escalate the ticket onto the primary on-call DBA, even when there is really nothing wrong.

Much of the time, there are multiple types of MySQL topology in these environments: standalone, galera cluster, replication, etc.  Writing large runbooks with detailed test cases can be a daunting process and one that will cause many first-level support engineers to give up and simply escalate the issue anyway.

In an effort to avoid undue call outs, we developed a simple bash …

Auf der FrOSCon 10 in St. Augustin habe ich kürzlich ein Update zu unseren Erfahrungen mit dem Thema "Private Cloud mit OpenSource" gegeben. Leider sind noch nicht alle Probleme, über die letztes Jahr berichtet wurde, behoben, aber wir sind schon ein gutes Stück weiter und haben neue Stolperfallen gefunden und z. T. auch überwunden.

Leider habe ich mich mit der Zeit ein wenig getäuscht, da ich den Talk vorher schon einmal in gekürzter Form in 40 Minuten unterbringen musste, aber in der Präsentation den Countdown für die FrOSCon wieder auf 60 Minuten zu stellen vergessen hatte. Zwischenzeitlich war ich deswegen der Meinung, ziemlich hinterherzuhängen... Hoffe, es macht trotzdem ein bisschen Spaß, so blieb am Ende mehr Zeit für Fragen und Gespräche :)

Hier noch die Folien auf Slideshare:

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Reprint a PDF for MySQL Injection Test

MySQL Error Based SQL Injection Using EXP

Sun of database technologies is shining through the cloud technology. Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and various other databases are bringing forth some nifty offerings and this Log Buffer Edition covers some of them.

Oracle:

• How to create your own Oracle database merge patch.
• Finally the work of a database designer will be recognized! Oracle has announced the Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards.
• Oracle Documents Cloud Service R4: Why You Should Seriously Consider It for Your Enterprise.
• Mixing Servers in a Server …

Loading databases on virtual systems is not as straight forward as it should be. Last time the foundation for using Ansible was set down on our quest to be able to have fully functional database servers on virtual servers automatically. But that prompted a few of you to remind me that you do not always need Ansible.

Without Ansible
You can have Vagrant do the work. Modify the vagrant file to run a script to run a script when provisioned, such as
config.vm.provision :shell,path: "setup.sh"
and create the setup.sh shell script.

#!/bin/bash
#
# example setup script for LAMP stack on Vagant box
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5
## Set …

Automation software like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible can quickly load software on virtual servers. But how do you get your MySQL database instances loaded on these new servers? And how do you do it securely? Lets start with a fairly common pairing.

Ansible and Vagrant work very well together and the documentation for getting both to work together is rather extensive. BTW the newest version VirtualBox is 5.0 was recently released with a large number of improvements. Follow the documentation at their respective sites to get VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Ansible installed.

The linchpin is the Vagrantfile which controls how Vagrant starts the server. Inside this file we pull in an Ansible playbook.