Autoscaling your webserver tier is typically straightforward. Image your Apache server with source code or without, then sync down files from S3 upon spinup. Roll that image into the autoscale configuration and you’re all set.

With the database tier though, things can be a bit tricky. The typical configuration we see is to have a single master database where your application writes. But scaling out or horizontally on Amazon EC2 should be as easy as adding more slaves, right? Why not automate that process?

Below we’ve set out to answer some of the questions you’re likely to face when setting up slaves against your master. We’ve included instructions on building an AMI that automatically spins up as a slave. Fancy!

1. How Can I Autoscale My Database Tier?

Step 1: Build an auto-starting MySQL slave against your master.

Step 2: Configure those to …

With the increasing data and user demand, ensuring the scalability of your MySQL database has become crucial to maintain optimal performance. With this, you can handle growing amounts of data, traffic, and user requests with your database in MySQL. But how to boost MySQL scalability?

This is the most trending question among MySQL users and if you are one of them, then this article is just for you. You can simply boost MySQL scalability by optimizing MySQL queries, database schema, and server configuration.

In this article, we’ll explore five effective ways to boost MySQL scalability and handle your database’s growth effectively. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s explore them below!

5 Ways To Boost MySQL Scalability

There are a lot of scalability challenges we see with clients over and over. The list could easily include 20, 50, or even 100 items, but we shortened it down to the biggest five issues we …

Amazon’s Relational Database Service is based on MySQL under the hood. So many colleagues and clients ask me – should I go with RDS or MySQL? As with every technology question, the answer is – it depends.

In this article, we are going to discuss 10 use cases of RDS or MySQL. Let’s get started below.

Ten Use Cases of RDS or MySQL

Here are some scenarios to help you decide:

1. I’m Replicating into Amazon from A Physical Datacenter

A: This setup is common if you’re using Amazon’s VPC or Virtual Private Cloud. With a router dropped into your datacenter, VPC allows you to extend and spinup virtual instances from Amazon as if they’re sitting in your own existing datacenter.

Great stuff, but you won’t be able to replicate from your existing master MySQL instance to cloud Amazon RDS instances. To do that, roll your own with MySQL 5.5 or Percona 5.5.  RDS can …

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 the demand for MySQL DBAs has never been better.

In this article, I’m going to discuss the mythical MySQL DBA, the reason why MySQL DBA and target.com keep crashing and much more. So, let’s get started!

Why Target Keeps Crashing

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 …

Continuing from our Top MySQL DBA interview questions (Part 1) here are five more questions that test a MySQL DBA’s knowledge, with two that will help suss out some personality traits.

6. Disk I/O

Disk performance should be an ever-present concern to a DBA. So, although they don’t need to be a storage specialist, they should have a working knowledge. Ask them about RAID versions, mirroring versus striping, and so forth. Mirroring combines two disks as a unit. Every write is duplicated on both disks.

If you lose one disk, you have an immediate copy. Like a tandem truck that has spare tires running in parallel. Lose one, and you don’t have to pull over immediately to replace it. Striping spreads I/O over multiple disks so you on the one hand increase throughput linearly as you add disks.

Setting up replication in MySQL is something we need to do quite often. Slaves die, replication fails, or tables and data get out of sync. Whenever we build a slave, we must start with a snapshot of all the data from the master database.

MySQLdump is the tried-and-true method of doing this, however it requires that we lock all the tables in the database. If we’re dumping a large database, this could be a significant period, where no writing can happen to our database for the duration of the backup. For many environments read-only is still an outage.

How to Create a Slave Using Xtrabackup

Enter hotbackups to the rescue. Percona comes with a tool that allows you to perform hotbackups of a running MySQL database, with no blocking. It’s able to do this because of Innodb & multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). Luckily we don’t need to dig into the guts to enjoy the benefits of this great technology.

Here’s …

This article is from 2006. MySQL has come a long way since then. MySQL 5.5 is very robust and feature-rich, matching Oracle in many different areas including datatypes, stored procedures and functions, high availability solutions, ACID compliance and MVCC, hotbackups, cold backups and dumps, full text, and other index options, materialized views and much more.  Here’s a high level mysql feature guide.

What really separates the two technologies is culture. MySQL, rooted in the open-source tradition is much more do-it-yourself, leaning towards roll-your-own solutions in many cases. Meanwhile, Oracle provides named and proven paths to solve specific problems.

You might also check out:  …

MySQL DBAs are in greater demand now than they’ve ever been. While some firms are losing the fight for talent, promising startups with a progressive bent are getting first dibs with the best applicants.

Whatever the case, interviewing for a MySQL DBA is a skill in itself so I thought I’d share a guide of top MySQL DBA interview questions to help with your screening process.
It’s long and detailed with some background to give context so I will be publishing this in two parts.

The History of The DBA As A Career

In the Oracle world of enterprise applications, the DBA has long been a strong career path. Companies building their sales staff required Peoplesoft or SAP, and those deploying the financial applications or e-business suite needed operations teams to manage those systems.

At the heart of that operations team were database administrators or DBAs, a catchall title that …

This blog post describes how to use MySQL Autopilot to automate many tasks in MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, including schema inference, capacity estimation, load time estimation, load script generation, adaptive data sampling, parallel loading of data, and more.

The upcoming tutorial will focus on the ROUND function, which is used to round numeric values for precision and accuracy. Rounding is vital in databases to avoid discrepancies in calculations, particularly with financial and scientific data. The article will provide practical examples and insights into effectively using the ROUND function for reliable results in dbForge Studio for MySQL.

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