Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework

Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.

Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.

After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 …

Read the original article at The Mythical MySQL DBA

I’ve  been getting more than my fair share of calls from recruiters of late. Even in this depressed economic climate where jobs are rarer than a cab at rush-hour, it’s heartening to know that tech engineers are in great demand. And it’s even more heartening to think that demand for MySQL DBAs has never been better.

My reckoning was confirmed by a Bloomberg news report about stalwart retailers suffering from a dearth of talented engineers. Bloomberg cited Target’s outage-prone e-commerce site as a symptom of, among other things the market’s shortage. One of the challenges old-timers like Target face is having to compete with Silicon Valley startups as a …

Read the original article at Book Review – Effective MySQL

Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements by Ronald Bradford No Nonsense, Readable, Practical, and Compact I like that this book is small; 150 pages means you can carry it easily.  It’s also very no nonsense.  It does not dig too deeply into theory unless it directly relates to your day-to-day needs.  And those needs probably cluster [...]

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Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP — altogether they mean LAMP. I’m not talking about watts and bulbs.

And if you desire is for a comprehensive, robust server, your IT infrastructure has to include all of these systems.

Monitis has put together a checklist of 101 actions you can take to maximize security around LAMP.  Hopefully we’re shedding a little light around this issue for you to give you some new ideas on how to make administering your system easier — so that, in turn, you can focus on more strategic tasks. You …

Join me for a webinar where I discuss how the recent changes and trends in big data management effect the enterprise.  This event is sponsored by Red Rock and RockSolid.

Overview:

It is an exciting and interesting time to be involved in data. More change of influence has occurred in the database management in the last 18 months than has occurred in the last 18 years. New technologies such as NoSQL & Hadoop and radical redesigns of existing technologies, like NewSQL , will change dramatically how we manage data moving forward. 

These technologies bring with them possibilities both in terms of the scale of data retained but also in how this data can be utilized as an information asset. The ability to leverage Big Data to drive …

Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.

…

Restaurant Scalability

Could pro-waitering serve up some lessons on web scalability? Observing peak hour dining at a New York restaurant gave us some insight.

I was dining at a restaurant the other day with friends. It was a warm and cozy place, nicely decorated with a long, narrow dining room.  The food was scrumptious, yet we were getting increasingly frustrated by the service as the night went along.

With some waiting experience behind me, I could immediately see the problem. The waiters, probably through lack of experience, were making the mistake of doing one thing at a time.  They would go to a table, respond to one customer's request, and go and fetch that item.  Back and forth, back and forth they would dart, but always dealing with …

Often I think about challenges that organizations face with “Big Data”.  While Big Data is a generic and over used term, what I am really referring to is an organizations ability to disseminate, understand and ultimately benefit from increasing volumes of data.  It is almost without question that in the future customers will be won/lost, competitive advantage will be gained/forfeited and businesses will succeed/fail based on their ability to leverage their data assets.

It may be surprising what I think are the near term challenges.  Largely I don’t think these are purely technical.  There are enough wheels in motion now to almost guarantee that data accessibility will continue to improve at pace in-line with the increase in data volume.  Sure, there will continue to be lots of interesting innovation with technology, but when organizations like …

Reading yesterday that the NSA has submitted a proposal to Apache to incubate their Accumulo platform.  This, according to the description, is a key/value store built over Hadoop which appears to provide similar function to HBase except it provides “cell level access labels” to allow fine grained access control.  This is something you would expect as a requirement for many applications built at government agencies like the NSA.  But this also is very important for organizations in health care and law enforcement etc where strict control is required to large volumes of privacy sensitive data.

An interesting part of this is how it highlights the acceptance of Hadoop.  Hadoop is no longer just a new technology scratching at the …

Apache and syslog-ng

While logging to a database back-end has its benefits, the setup as it stands leaves us wanting. Some applications, such as Apache, do not log via syslog-ng by default. The good news is that this can be easily remedied, and there are a couple of different ways of doing this. First, the less good way:

Method #1: Changing the Apache configuration file.

First, we need to setup syslog-ng appropriately by creating a new source for apache, such as the following:

source s_apache {
 unix-stream("/var/log/apache2/apache_log.socket"
 max-connections(512)
 keep-alive(yes));
 };

log { source(s_apache); destination(d_pgsql); };

This recycles the original destination for …