One thing you learn when you start to manage several servers is that life is easier if things are done the same way. I manage a few MySQL database instances on a few different hosts and here are a list of some things which I think could do with improvement. Note these views are from a UNIX point of view and for Windows MySQL DBAs many of the comments may not be appropriate. Also I’m not talking here about the administration of a single database, but the problems when you administer multiple instances.

Issues

First lets talk about the issues I notice in my day to day usage of MySQL. Then I’ll try and come up with some suggestions as to how these issues might be resolved.

• Give up root earlier and expect to run as a non-root user. While it’s true that the mysqld process normally runs as the mysql user it’s also true that to be a MySQL DBA is almost impossible at the moment if you don’t have root …

I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

I’ve been working on various different MySQL related issues and maintenance procedures some of which have not gone according to plan.  Here is a recipe that may help you avoid wasting a lot of time, especially if your database is large.

In order to do some of these tests make tests against a server configured identically to the one you plan to work on but instead which has no data. That is the mysql database needs to be complete but the other databases need to be dumped with the –no-data or -d options.  Don’t forget to also include any triggers or stored routines.

Now run the “procedure” on this “emtpy instance”. As it has no data most things run very quickly. So if you have issues you can repeat the procedure in no time. Restoring the instance too is easy as it’s tiny. This makes the whole procedure scriptable and you can be confident in the results.

Once you are …

My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009.

The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know.

For those of you unfamiliar with OmniTI, Theo is the CEO of this rather remarkable company specializing in Internet-scale architecture consulting. They generalize on Internet-scale architecture, not on one specific dimension the way Pythian specializes on the database tier. This allows them to see Internet-scale workloads from a unique systemic, multidisciplinary point of view; from the user experience all the way up the stack, through …

Peter Lieverdink (also known as cafuego on IRC/identi.ca, engineer on OurDelta builds and for Open Query) has co-authored a book that’s available since Monday. The title is Pro Linux System Administration published by Apress.

These days some people don’t want to bother with system administration, and either hire or outsource. Others want to find out more and do things themselves (home and small office use), and that’s the intended audience for this book.

In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!

Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.

The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.

Dear Lazyweb,

So, I’ve been in Chicago for a week teaching a beginner and an intermediate course on using and administering Linux machines. This week, I’ll teach an intermediate and an advanced course on Linux, and the advanced course will cover profiling and debugging. The main tools I’m covering will be valgrind and oprofile, though I’ll be going over lots of other stuff, like iostat, vmstat, strace, what’s under /proc, and some more basic stuff like sending signals and the like.

So what makes me a bit nervous is, being that the advanced students are mostly CS-degree-holding system developers, they’ll probably be expecting me to know very low-level details of how things are implemented at  the system/kernel level. I’d love to know more about that myself, and actively try to increase my knowledge in that area! Alas, most of my experience with low-level …

Lots of blogs list a bunch of stuff that happened in the year just past, and I have done a year-in-review post before, but in looking back at posts on this blog and elsewhere, what strikes me most is not the big achievements that took place in technology in 2008, but rather the questions that remain unanswered. So much got started in 2008 — I’m really excited to see what happens with it all in 2009!

Cloud Computing

Technically, the various utility or ‘cloud’ computing initiatives started prior to 2008, but in my observation, they gained more traction in 2008 than at any other time. At the beginning of 2008, I was using Amazon’s S3, and testing to expand into more wide use of EC2 during my time as Technology Director for AddThis.com (pre-buyout). I was also investigating tons of other technologies that take different approaches to the higher-level problem these things all try to solve: owning, and housing (and …

One of the best ways to keep up with your field and network at the same time is to attend conferences. It’s one of the things I look forward to every year. After learning that O’Reilly has decided to commit blasphemy and *not* hold OSCON in Portland, Oregon the same week as the Oregon Brewers Festival, I was inspired to look around at what other conferences I might attend in 2009. Turns out, this is a huge pain in the ass, because I can’t find a single, central place that lists all of the conferences I’m likely to be interested in.

So… I created a public Google Calendar. It’s called “US Technical Conferences”. It needs more conferences, but I’ve listed the interesting ones I found. In order to keep the calendar from getting overwhelmingly crowded, I’ve decided that conferences on the list should:

• Deal with open source technology in some way. This is purposely broad.
• Be at least 3 days in …