I've been recently asked for advice on running MySQL on EC2.

• 
  
• Run only a one MySQL server process on the instance.
  
• This bears repeating. Run only the MySQL server on the instance. Not your app server, or your dev environment, or your...
  
• Use the large or xlarge size, not the small size.
  
• Dedicate the additional partitions to be InnoDB tablespaces.
  
• "Pre-heat" the tablespace partition with dd. That is, dd if=/dev/urandom of=/path/to/part bs=8K before using the partition.
  
• This is one of the times where it's worth it to run tablespace on raw devices. Don't bother to put a filesystem down on those partitions.
  
• Tune your database server. Get someone who knows MySQL tuning to do it for you.
  
• Backup and Replicate with rigor. When an instance gets shut down, it …

This keeps happening - the community I need to stay engaged with keeps jumping on new forms of communication, and if you want to stay in tune, you need to jump on too.

This first happened with blogging, and then with Facebook. These I actually don't mind. I like writing and reading blogs, and Google Reader has made it fairly easy for me to quickly digest what's going on.

Facebook is nice because I keep in touch with friends. It's not so much about work but about getting a little more connected, particularly to old friends who I don't see much any more.

But this Twitter thing - I really don't like it. Sorry. I subscribe to someone's Twitter feed because I value their thoughts, but then it's serious drinking from a firehose. Many of these Thought Leaders are just constantly (I mean constantly, like I don't know how they get any work done) …

Due to the efforts of Brian Moon and Michelangelo van Dam, I've been sucked into a meme started by Tony Bibbs. My initial reaction to this unfortunate event was ... (envision Steven Colbert, hands raised...) "Noooooo!!!" But I got over it. Hey, it's the holiday season, I might as well be a good boy and fulfill the modern-day geek's equivalent of a chain letter.

So, without further ado, here is my list of seven things about me you probably could care less about and will skip over to see if you are on my list of tagged people. (Yeah, you know you will.)

• My real name is not Jay
• I have a twin brother, …

2008 was a good year for MySQL Certification. 1,986 folks took exams which is a 14.6% gain over 2007. 736 candidates earned certifications and that is a 14.4% gain. The biggest gains were in Associate (up 300%) and DBA (up 35%) certifications. Oddly the Developer cert was down 40%.

So what happens in 2009?

The DBA and Developer exams are both changing format to performance based tests. Candidates will be tested on a virtual server and provided with a list of tasks that need to be accomplished. The DBA exam is actually in alpha est and about to go to beta. This testing is being done on two sets of virtual environments which provide their own qualities. The Linux environment is probably closer to what most DBA's working environment but the Windows version allows the candidate more control over the system. More news here later in the month.

Computer certifications will take …

When your favourite ex yahoo employee and mysql guru blogs about a "dns problem" and how he solved it using Twitter you can only smile ;) At last some useful use for Twitter .. when it's up at least ..

The future of commercial open source software lies in commercial licensing strategies, but which are the strategies that are more likely to deliver the results vendors are looking for?

Much of the open source blog chatter over the Christmas period was related to open source business models/strategies, largely triggered by a post written by Dave Rosenberg in which he declared that commercial licensing, and specifically open core licensing will be all the rage in 2009:

“Typically we now see an “open core” freely available with “exclusive” or proprietary features only available when you pay. If you are trying to build a commercial business on top of an open source project, this is likely the right answer.”

…

So, my Haystacks teammate Brian DeShong tagged me in his list of seven.  We won
that trivia contest by the way.  It was a real team effort.

So, here goes my seven things:

1. I have six kids.  Okay, let that sink in.  Yes, six.  Logan(12), Macy(11), Molly(9), Parker(7), Collin(3), and Hudson(6 months).  I know what causes it.  Yes, it is hard at times.  But, there are those moments when you are sitting in the yard or in the den and all is right in the world.  The best program I will ever write will not compare to what have done with my children.  They are truly my greatest project.  My wonderful wife blogs about them at Moonmania.
2. I started my career as a Visual Basic programmer.  PHP and VB are very much alike.  …

Installing MySQL is quite an easy thing to do, especially when done using pkgs, dmgs or exes. It gets just a tad more time consuming and brain intensive when installing a .tar.gz binary package. It is when you’re compiling MySQL source directly that you’ll need some planning and playing, but the latter is only done in particular cases such as when you’ll need a particular engine not shipped with a pre-compiled package etc.

Today we’re going through the steps required for a typical MySQL installation from a .tar.gz package on a *nix based platform, including the download, installation, configuration and securing.

Steps involved:
1. Download MySQL binary tarball from mysql.com
2. Create a folder structure where the installation will be held.
3. Install the package
4. Secure the installation

Step 1: Download MySQL

Go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and choose the particular …

Friday, I helped a friend who is working a MySQL gig to optimize a query that should have been way fast, but was taking about 100 seconds. Brian even took a look and helped with it. I learned today what the real problem was. The whole system was running on a single ec2-small instance. And by "whole system", I mean a test mysql server, the production mysql server, a test apache server, and the production apache server. All on one ec2-small.

Talk about doing it wrong.

TIMESTAMP is interesting in that it can give you an easy way of keeping track of when was the last time a row was modified, with a few caveats, listed below. The tests were run on 5.1.30-community MySQL Community Server (GPL).

• By default, TIMESTAMP is NOT NULL. Inserting a NULL value causes it to store the current DATETIME;

  mysql> CREATE TABLE t1 (c1 TIMESTAMP);
  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
  
  mysql> INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (NULL);
  Query OK, 1 row affected (0.03 sec)
  
  mysql> SELECT * FROM t1;
  +---------------------+
  | c1                  |
  +---------------------+
  | 2008-12-30 20:42:25 |
  +---------------------+
  1 row in set (0.00 sec)
  
  mysql> CREATE TABLE t2 (c1 TIMESTAMP, c2 TIMESTAMP);
  Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)
  
  mysql> INSERT INTO t2 VALUES (NULL, NULL);
  Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)
  
  mysql> SELECT * FROM t2;
  +---------------------+---------------------+
  | c1                  | c2                  | …