This week was a great catch-up week. There is only one conference I am doing for the rest of the year, CodeConnexx, though submissions for conferences in the first quarter of 2013 are happening, too. We have some great candidates we are interviewing for our open Database Administrator position.
The database team has gotten a lot of great stuff done this week (I know, I say that all the time, but it’s true!):

• Audited and got rid of legacy MyISAM tables in our Addons database.
  
• Decommissioned an old MySQL cluster that has not been in use for a while. It is the database that used to back the predecessor to Mozillians.
  
• Moved half our backups in …

Who is Keyser Soze?

Some recall:
"...a rarely seen, nearly mythical kingpin... Most believe he is not real, but rather boogeyman story or name-drop to intimidate people."

Some people think of it as :
"Keyser Soze – DBA or developer who looks ordinary but has insanely good skills, hardly anybody knows about it."

What does any of this have to do with MySQL ?

Well for this blog post, "Keyser Soze" is the nearly mythical query that most believe is not real, but rather a "boogeyman sql query" that wastes resources in a MySQL Database. Typically, every application has at least one. Your developers blame the database for being slow and they have caught the ear of the CEO. It is time to resolve the boogeyman issue and find out. The difference is we want a better agent than Dave Kujan, so we have the …

This Log Buffer Edition is once again here, packed with rocking and rolling blogs from the database world. Log Buffer#292 comprises of select few posts from Oracle, MySQL and the SQL Server. Enjoy. Oracle: Pythian’s OCM Andrey Goryunov is attracted and enticed by the silent installation of EM Cloud Control 12c. Bobby Durrett is helping [...]

The idea to use SSD/Flash as a cache is not new, and there are different solutions for this, both OpenSource like L2ARC for ZFS and Flashcache from Facebook, and proprietary, like directCache from Fusion-io.
They all however have some limitations, that’s why I am considering to have L2 cache on a database level, as an extension to InnoDB buffer pool.
Fortunately, there is a project in progress Flash_Cache_For_InnoDB by David which implements this.
David helped us to port his work to the latest Percona Server and you can get it from our launchpad Percona Server 5.5.28 …

How many different ways can you get into trouble with replication?  Most of them are obvious once they happen to you, but until they do you're often not watching out for them.  This is a list of all the ones I can think of, and most of them have happened to me at one point.

Don't get me wrong, I think MySQL Replication is very robust and easy to use, but when you have lots of servers replicating, you're likely to hit those edge-cases more often; you will see problems.  It's better to plan on making things resilient than expecting they will never break.

1. Relay Log corruption

This happens either because the master's binlog is corrupted, or because of network issues. Or aliens.  The causes can seem pretty random, and it's usually just easier to fix it and move on.  By issuing a CHANGE MASTER TO ... ; statement which includes MASTER_HOST and sets the …

If you are planning to upgrade or make any configuration change on your MySQL database the first advice usually is:

- Benchmark!

How should we do that benchmark? People usually run generic benchmark tools like sysbench, tpcc or mysqlslap that are good to know the number of transactions per seconds that a database can do but it doesn’t care about your workload, data set or queries. Those tools just run random queries against random generated data.

The best way to run a benchmark is replaying the load of your production server against a different database server and here is where Percona Playback can help us. Percona Playback is a new tool that can replay the data captured from the production server in another different server. It can replay queries from tcpdump or slow query logs. With this tool you can measure how a database upgrade, change on …

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 also jump to …

Let us start when the first version of Windows XP was released. It included a feature that was not available in Windows 2000: ‘System Restore’. It was basically a set of hidden copies of system files that could be restored to the system on demand. It was a highly useful feature at the time as a lot of bad device drivers were around and installing one could destroy the system to an extent so that reinstalling the system would often be faster than repairing the damage (not to mention that repair would sometimes require skills that many users did not have). It saved my day at least 10 times back in the mid-00′es – in particular before the release of Servicepack 1 for WinXP that ‘hardened’ WinXP a lot against such ‘bad driver attacks’.

‘System Restore’ is still available in …

Thursday, October 25, 2012
MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Release: What’s New

Join the webinar to get all of the detail on MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR and Early Access releases. Announced at the recent MySQL Connect conference, Oracle has published previews of MySQL Cluster 7.3.

MySQL Cluster 7.3 delivers more power and flexibility than ever before. The webinar will demonstrate each of these new features and show you how to get started.

WHO:
Andrew Morgan, MySQL Product Management
Mat Keep, MySQL Product Management

WHAT:
MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Release: What’s New web presentation.

WHEN:
Thursday, October 25, 2012: 09:00 Pacific time (America)

Thu, Oct 25: 06:00 Hawaii time
Thu, Oct 25: 10:00 Mountain time (America)
Thu, Oct 25: 11:00 Central time (America)
Thu, Oct 25: 12:00 Eastern time (America)
Thu, Oct 25: 16:00 UTC
…

We're excited to announce that Jet Profiler for MySQL will be featured on BitsDuJour, a 'deal-of-the-day' website that offers extensive, one-time discounts on a variety of great products.

Jet Profiler for MySQL will be featured at BitsDuJour on Friday, 26 October, at the dramatically reduced price of $249.50 (50% discount). The normal purchase price for Jet Profiler for MySQL is $499.00!

If you have any friends or colleagues who might be interested in Jet Profiler for MySQL, please let them know about this sale. We can't afford to offer this kind of discount often, and it will only be available on BitsDuJour for a single day.

Visit the promotion page on BitsDuJour on Friday 26 October to get Jet Profiler for MySQL for $249.50.


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