Topics for this podcast:
*Cloud M&A potential around OpenStack
*Oracle’s commercial extensions for MySQL
*Puppet Labs rolls out Enterprise 2.0, hosts PuppetConf
*Basho bolsters Riak distributed data store in NoSQL race
*Our latest special CAOS report, ‘The Changing Linux Landscape’
iTunes or direct download (25:59, 4.4MB)
Databases are the center of today’s web, enterprise and embedded applications, storing and protecting an organization’s most valuable assets and supporting business-critical applications. Just minutes of downtime can result in significant lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. Ensuring database highly availability is therefore a top priority for any organization.
The new MySQL Guide to High Availability solutions is designed to navigate users through the HA maze, discussing:
- The causes, effects and impacts of downtime;
- Methodologies to select the right HA solution;
- Different approaches to delivering highly available MySQL services;
- Operational best practices to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
As discussed in the new Guide, selecting the high availability solution …
[Read more]Databases are the center of today’s web, enterprise and embedded applications, storing and protecting an organization’s most valuable assets and supporting business-critical applications. Just minutes of downtime can result in significant lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. Ensuring database highly availability is therefore a top priority for any organization.
The new MySQL Guide to High Availability solutions is designed to navigate users through the HA maze, discussing:
- The causes, effects and impacts of downtime;
- Methodologies to select the right HA solution;
- Different approaches to delivering highly available MySQL services;
- Operational best practices to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
As discussed in the new Guide, selecting the high availability solution …
[Read more]A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2011-08-31 through 2011-09-21:
More and more public cloud companies are moving to managed cloud
services to improve their value-add (price premium) and the
stickiness of their solution. However, the shift to a database as
a service (DaaS) severely reduces the DBAs visibility into the
business, thus limiting the ability to hand tune the database to
the requirements of the application and the database. The
solution is a cloud database that eliminates the hand-tuning of
the database, thereby enabling the DBA to be equally effective
even with limited visibility into the business and application
needs. It is these unique needs, particularly for SQL databases,
that is fueling the NewSQL movement.
DBAs traditionally have insight into the company, enabling them
to hand tune the database in a collaborative basis with the
development team, such as:
1. Performance Trade-offs/Tuning: The database is partitioned and
tuned to address business requirements, maximizing performance of …
As public clouds are commoditized, the public cloud vendors are
increasingly moving to higher margin and stickier managed
services. In the early days of the public cloud, renting compute
and storage was unique, exciting, sticky and profitable. It has
quickly become a commodity. In order to provide differentiation,
maintain margins and create barriers to customer exit, against
increasing competition, the cloud is moving toward a collection
of managed services.
Public clouds are growing beyond simple compute instances to
platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS is then comprised of various
modules, including database as a service (DaaS). In the early
days you rented a number of compute instances, loaded your
database software and you were the DBA managing all
aspects of that database. Increasingly, public clouds are moving
toward a DaaS model, where the cloud customer writes to a simple
database API and the cloud provider is the DBA. …
One lesson learned in more than two decades working in this industry is that most of the IT professionals are impatient, want to achieve results immediately, and, most importantly, they don't read documentation. Much as the average geek is happy to answer many requests with a dismissive RTFM, the same geeks are not as diligent when it comes to learning about new or updated technologies. For this reason, there is a kind of documentation that is very much appreciated by busy and impatient professionals: cookbooks. And I am not talking about food. Geeks are not known for being cooks (1) and they like fast food. I am talking about collection of technical recipes, short articles where a problem is briefly stated, and a direct solution is shown. Working with Tungsten Replicator, I am constantly amazed at all the things you can do with it, and at the same time, I am amazed at how so few …
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When you set-up the same software several times (for you or for
your customers), you want that software to install quickly and
reliably, and you are generally happy when everything works as
expected.
In this context, a failing installation is when the
installation process exits unexpectedly, and you are left with an
error message and the prospect of looking at the manual to find
out what was it.
A failing installation is unpleasant, you'd say, and I concur.
But do you know what's more unpleasant than a failing
installation? It's an installation that succeeds, only to fail
silently the first time you try using the application.
Looking at this enhanced definition, it is no surprise that I
assert to find happiness in failure. And I have practical reasons
for my claim. When I first tried Tungsten
Replicator installation, it succeeded. And to my …
I was checking a third party server, and I needed to find if
there were tables without primary keys. This is important to
know, not only because the lack of primary keys affects
performance and data accuracy in general, but also because in
row-based replication performance can degrade
beyond belief when updating tables without primary keys.Anyway, I
did not remember off the bat any method to get this information
from a server with thousands of tables, and thus I went to find a
solution on my own.My first instinct called for using the
COLUMNS table from the
INFORMATIOn_SCHEMA, and so I came up with this
query, where I sum the number of columns that are inside either a
PRIMARY or UNIQUE key and filter only the ones where such sum is
zero (i.e. no primary or unique keys):
[Read more]
select
…
From time to time I see articles in defense of natural primary keys against surrogate keys.I don't take an immovable stand on either side, as I have seen good cases for both. In general, I like the idea of a natural primary key, when I see one that it is really natural. Quite often, though, a natural primary key has proved itself faulty. And most of the times, when such faults happened, it was because of limited understanding of the data. I like to describe this kind of misinformation as data analysis culture clash.When choosing a natural primary key, one should consider which element, or group of elements, are unique in a given set. Not only that, they must be immutable, at least within that set.For example, in a group of people, we may assume that a combination of name, surname, date and place of birth is a good natural primary key. Well, no. It isn't, for several reasons. Read on for a few real cases.If we rule out the above combination, …
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