Read the original article at Where’s my 80 million dollars?

Way back in the heydays of the dot-com boom, the year is 1999.

I worked for a medium size internet startup called Method Five. When I came on board they were having a terrible time with their site performance.

Website crashing

When I first met the team, I was tasked with performance problems. After all their flagship web property kept crashing, and it didn’t look good to investors. As with most web properties in those days it was a home-grown datacenter in the back of the office, running on Sun Microsystems hardware, with Oracle on the backend and Apache serving webpages.

Negotiating an acquisition

As it …

On Linux, you have a plethora of File Systems available.

Recently I was testing databases (MySQL, MariaDB) especially with ThreadPool against a Violin Flash Memory Array, and I forgot what file system the LUN was mounted (and formatted) as.

There are two ways to find out:

• df -T (show mounted life systems, along with the FS type)
• file -s /dev/xxx (show more details about a FS node)

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A set of internet tools, is available at otala.net/tools.shtml

• Traceroute
• Whois & JWhois
• NSLookup
• Ping
• DNSWalk
• NetStat
• ENUM (e164.org phone number lookup)

More to come, as (if/when) I get time -- suggestions welcome

If you haven’t checked into pt-online-schema-change yet, now’s a great time to sign up for my free webinar Thursday, July 19, 3-4 PM EDT. I’ll explain and demonstrate the tool, and walk you through everything you need to decide whether it’s right for you.

If you haven’t even heard about pt-online-schema-change yet, the short version is it lets you alter tables in MySQL with practically no downtime at all. This even works for really big tables that might take hours or days to alter — normally a blocking operation. In fact, 37Signals just wrote a blog post saying it has helped them achieve 99.99% uptime for their Basecamp …

Percona is back for a second New York Percona Live Conference. As the resident New York MySQL Expert, I will again be presenting. My session will be on MySQL Backup and Recovery Essentials.

You can only present so much in one hour, and this presentation just touches on the highlights of what is possible. More detailed information about the right backup and recovery strategy and associated tools is available in my current book Effective MySQL: Backup and Recovery.

I have already written about how documentation is an opportunity for Open Source Software to show off, and area where we have the potential to be better than the Open Source folks. Another such area is interoperability, and for myself, interoperability between databases is what springs to mind.

Database schema interoperability We all know what a MySQL schema looks like: I bunch of CREATE DATABASE, CREATE TABLE CREATE this-and-that, all together in a file. Usually, when someone asks for a schema, this is what they get, and this is independent on if the user is using PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle or whatever database.

In some way, most SQL based databases follow some variation of the SQL standard, but as they all, without exception, also have extensions (which they are allowed to, even if the follow the SQL …

I wanted to add a weather station to my home automation system for a number of reasons...

• watering lawn (temperature, season, moisture, dew point)
• weather (temperature, chance of rain)
• historical (collect data over years)

In 2006, I bought the weather station WS2300 and integrated it in a number of ways.

• I have a sizable MySQL database, so using the mysql2300 module, I stick weather data into the database every 10 minutes

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I read somewhere that you should do extra watering of lawn (after sunset), if the temperature exceeded 80° F during the day.

So, a really quick hack works like this:

A bash script
#!/bin/bash

TEMP="`/usr/bin/mysql -ss open2300 -e \"SELECT FLOOR(MAX(temp_out)) FROM weather GROUP BY (rec_date) ORDER BY rec_date DESC LIMIT 1;\"`"
if [ "$TEMP" -ge 80 ]; then
/root/water-on.exp
/root/water2.exp 120 1
/root/water3.exp 120 1
fi

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Introduction

Attracting over 2m subscribers in just 4 months and growing by 30,000 new users per day, Playful Play needed a database that was able to keep pace with the massive scalability and high availability demands of the wildly successful La Vecindad de El Chavo Facebook game.

Playful Play selected MySQL Cluster CGE running on a public cloud to power their gaming platform, providing:

• 45% improvement in performance;
• 99.999% uptime;
• 80% reduction in DBA overhead;
• Local language support, 24x7.

As a result, Playful Play has been able to maintain user growth rates and attract new advertisers to the platform, while enhancing agility and reducing cost. …

Sometimes it is needed to have a list of dates to join it to another list, for join the gaps between tow dates. To solve this problem I wrote a simple stored procedure for mysql which creates me a temporary table with the dates in a given timespan and an interval. The Interval can be [...]