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 [...]

For more articles like these go to Sean Hull's Scalable Startups

Related posts:

1. Consulting essentials: Getting the business
2. Hiring is …

Call for Papers for the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, are set to close at the end of the day tomorrow Oct. 12th. Please consider submitting one or more speaking proposals. If you are selected to speak you will receive a free full conference pass valued at over $1,500.

In addition, Super Saver Registration for this conference and Advanced Rate registration for our London conference end tomorrow as well. Sign up now before the price goes up!

Submit your papers and or register here: http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2013/

or here for London: http://www.percona.com/live/london-2012/

Solid State Drive (SSD) have made it big and have made their way not only in desktop computing but also in mission-critical servers. SSDs have proved to be a break-through in IO performance and leave HDD far far behind in terms of Random IO performance. Random IO is what most of the database administrators would be concerned about as that is 90% of the IO pattern visible on database servers like MySQL. I have found Intel 520-series and Intel 910-series to be quite popular and they do give very good numbers in terms of Random IOPS. However, its not just performance that you should be concerned about, failure predictions and health gauges are also very important, as loss of data is a big NO-NO. There is a great deal of misconception about the endurance level of SSD, as its mostly compared to rotating disks even when measuring endurance levels, however, there is a big difference in how both SSD and HDD work, and that has a direct impact on the endurance …

Many of us know the joys of the "Screen" command. I did notice that this topic became a point of many questions at the recent Ohio LinuxFest, so I thought I could touch more on it here.

Being able to detach and reattach to a shell is a wonderful thing.  It is very useful when executing long query transactions like MySQL data exports or even running backups at times. It is also very useful to be able to change computers or locations and keep the same working shell environment. I often used Screen when I started a shell script that executed a full compressed backup, scp the files to a remote slave, and then would start to uncompress the backup onto the new slave. The entire process for this was around 24hrs easily so being able to reattached and monitor the progress was very helpful.

Being able to have a visual display that is quick and clear as to what host your …

The core technology behind Tokutek is based on the academic research by our founders: Michael Bender, Bradley Kuszmaul and Martin Farach-Colton.  They are all still in academia, in addition to their work at Tokutek.

Back in March, the White House kicked off a new Initiative for Big Data.  Last week, the National Science Foundation announced the first interagency grants for this.  Eight awards were given, and our own Michael Bender and Martin Farach-Colton, along with Robert Johnson of Stony Brook University, received one of them.

Through their academic work, they hope to extend our …

Pluggable Authentication is one of the many new MySQL 5.6 features. Pluggable authentication adds a capability to use external authentication services (PAM, Windows login IDs, LDAP, Kerberos, …) but also introduces built-in strong SHA-256 hashing for passwords. The SHA-256 Authentication Plugin uses encryption to protect the password from being sniffed during authentication. Read a live report from teaching the PHP mysqlnd library the new secure authentication method.

Your choices

Early MySQL versions have had very poor password hashing. The PHP mysqlnd library has never supported the old, insecure password hashing that was used until MySQL 4.1. …

In a previous post I showed how to implement multi-source round-robin replication in pure SQL using the tables that are needed for crash-safe replication. I also outlined a revised version of this approach in the Replication Tips & Tricks presentation I gave at MySQL Connect. This was, however, before the GTID (Global Transaction ID) implementation was done. Now that they are introduced, multi-source replication is even easier since you no longer have to keep track of the positions.

Figure 1. Tables for storing information about masters

CREATE TABLE my_masters (
    idx INT AUTO_INCREMENT,
    host CHAR(50) NOT NULL,
    port INT NOT NULL DEFAULT …

Parallel Universe is released in x86-64bit binaries for CentOS 5.x and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x OS.

Available at www.ParallelUniverse-inc.com/Download2.shtml .

Solid State Drive (SSD) have made it big and have made their way not only in desktop computing but also in mission-critical servers. SSDs have proved to be a break-through in IO performance and leave HDD far far behind in terms of Random IO performance. Random IO is what most of the database administrators would be concerned about as that is 90% of the IO pattern visible on database servers like MySQL. I have found Intel 520-series and Intel 910-series to be quite popular and they do give very good numbers in terms of Random IOPS. However, its not just performance that you should be concerned about, failure predictions and health gauges are also very important, as loss of data is a big NO-NO. There is a great deal of misconception about the endurance level of SSD, as its mostly compared to rotating disks even when measuring endurance levels, however, there is a big difference in how both SSD and HDD work, and that has a direct impact on the endurance …

Following the tremendous success of MySQL Connect, you can now watch some of the keynotes online:

The State of the Dolphin – by Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven and MySQL Vice President of Engineering Tomas Ulin

MySQL Perspectives – featuring power users of MySQL who share their experiences and perspectives:

• Jeremy Cole, DBA Team Manager, Twitter
• Daniel Austin, Chief Architect, PayPal
• Ash Kanagat, IT Director; and Shivinder Singh, Database Architect, Verizon Wireless

You can also access slides from a number of MySQL Connect presentations in the Content Catalog. Missing ones will be added shortly (provided the speakers consented …