As Farhan has already pointed out to us, Disaster is Inevitable - Must shutdown generators. My primary hosting provider The Planet had a serious meltdown, 9,000 servers unavailable, DNS and administration application .

My server was effectively totally unavailable from 3PM Saturday until 10AM Monday, 43 hours in total.

The problem didn’t stop there. Started and verified servers and domains, but like 8 hours later I find that the DNS is wrong on two important domains (I didn’t discover this because I have them in local /etc/hosts) because I moved them to a different IP like 2 weeks ago.

The Planet denied any problems, ticket logged to get them fixed because admin interface was still down.
Wind forward, …

Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a tech bibliophile.

I have owned more books covering more technologies than I care to admit. Some of my more technical friends have stood in awe of the number of tech books I own. I am also constantly rotating old books that almost *can’t* be useful anymore out of my collection because there’s just no room to keep them all, and it would be an almost embarrassingly large collection if not for the fact that I have no shame or guilt associated with my need for dead trees.

If you need further proof:

• I have, on more than one occasion, suggested to my wife that we take a walk around our local mall so I could browse the computer section of the book store, not to buy, but just to keep up with the new titles and stuff.
• Ok, I usually buy.
• I also go into book stores whenever I’m out of town to get a comparison of what seems to be popular in different areas of the …

Who Am I?
My name is Luca Olivari, I'm a technology enthusiast living in Italy. I was born in 1979 and I've created this blog having in mind a nice place to share thoughts about MySQL/Sun, Technology, Business Intelligence and other interestingness.

I'm currently working in Sun Microsystems as a Systems Engineer in MySQL Global Software practice and in my spare time I read, take pictures, travel, run and surf web2.0 sites. I'm interested in technology, science, marketing, communication, advertising, picture, classic books and many other things.

If you are in sync with my interests or you simply like to share something this is the right place.
Feel free to add comment to this post if you like to contribute in any other way to this blog.

I'm glad to meet you all!

If you want to look at some information about my personal interests let's have a look at …

Who Am I?
My name is Luca Olivari, I'm a technology enthusiast living in Italy. I was born in 1979 and I've created this blog having in mind a nice place to share thoughts about MySQL/Sun, Technology, Business Intelligence and other interestingness.

I'm currently working in Sun Microsystems as a Systems Engineer in MySQL Global Software practice and in my spare time I read, take pictures, travel, run and surf web2.0 sites. I'm interested in technology, science, marketing, communication, advertising, picture, classic books and many other things.

If you are in sync with my interests or you simply like to share something this is the right place.
Feel free to add comment to this post if you like to contribute in any other way to this blog.

I'm glad to meet you all!

If you want to look at some information about my personal interests let's have a look at …

Project: MySQL Forge RSS/Atom feeds

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

* Discussed the best approach to handle the feeds with Jay (my mentor) * Learned a lot about the way the code in Forge is organised and how the framework works * Decided what the feeds will look like in terms of different types of content * Searched some PHP feed writer classes to use * Switched to another (Launchpad.net hosted) repository which came along with some errors * Submitted my blog to PlanetMySQL
KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

None....

KEY CONCERNS

My university classes haven't finished yet (I've to go to university until the end of June).

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

* Writing the first working feed handlers

UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/

Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know, large * numerous = expensive, or rapidly filling disk partitions, or both.

Amazon’s S3 service, along with a simple downloadable suite of tools, and a shell script or two can ease your life considerably. Here’s one way to do it:

1. Get an Amazon Web Services account by going to the AWS website.
2. Download the ‘aws’ command line tool from here and install it.
3. Write a couple of shell scripts, and schedule them using cron.

Once you have your Amazon account, …

For many MySQL implementations scalability is a crucial requirement. Scaling on various dimensions: Size, Performance, Cost and DBA-Stress-Level.

While several factors impact the scalability of the database, underlying storage probably has the highest impact. You need to make sure that the storage will fill up the buffers fast enough to keep queries happy, and acknowledge the writes fast enough to keep transactions happy. You need to make sure that you can keep growing the available storage as your database grows - MySQL databases are particularly prone to collect more and more data. You also need to make sure that maintenance tasks such as backup, cloning, and application testing will scale gracefully with the size of your database.

Storage systems from NetApp are a great choice when designing for MySQL scalability. Administrators can expand storage on the go …

I got a fair amount of response from my last blogging about including the MySQL Administrator tool as a useful utility in a hands on exam for DBAs. In general I do not like GUIs and prefer the old fashion way. The first thing I did after getting my Mac laptop was open up a terminal to get to the command line interpreter. But I never expected so many to be in favor of forgoing the Administrator tool and sticking with the CLI.

You can read the comments for yourself. I found myself agreeing with all of them. I did receive some private emails that generally distilled to the DBA exam being test of DBA skills and not how well one can manage the latest version of an add-on product.

One of the reasons I used to tell novices to use the vi editor was that it was a common denominator and would be there at three in the morning after your data center had go to heck and you needed to get your servers back on line.
…

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I created and ran some simple tests on mysql and postgresql to figure out which one is faster. It is already known that postgresql is more stable and reliable than mysql. pgsql has a rich set of features. It is a complete RDBMS and also supports fulltext search.

All benchmarks were done on my laptop - Intel core 2 duo (2.0 GHz) with 4MB L2 cache & 2 GB ram. I have 64 Bit ubuntu system loaded