The latest from the MySQL community

I often hear recruiters say that they are having a hard time to find a MySQL production DBA. Well, since MySQL is not yet that mature as compared to Oracle, most DBAs are therefore relatively unseasoned.

And most DBA are not into production work yet. So, what are the experience / characteristics of a production DBA? Here are my two cents.

1. Manages 20-30 databases which are 25-30 GB in size.
2. Knows what to do when he is on-call.
3. Understands the inner workings of MySQL. For example, does he know what mysqldump actually do aside from backing up the data? How will it perform with a 25 GB data?
4. Based on the 1st criteria, the DBA will be careful in writing his queries. For example, he knows that select * from a table is query that should be banned from MySQL.
5. Very handy with scripting languages which could be PERL, Shell, etc. If the DBA has to update the configuration of 30 databases, …

The doorbell rang, I was almost to late .. but I still catched the post guy before he left..
He had a package

I knew what was in the package ..

but I was even more surprised when I opened the book..

Thnx a lot folks !!

I just uninstalled .Net 3.5 for some testing purposes. I can't get Toad For MySQL 4.0beta to work properly with 3.5. The absurd thing is that it had to download 10MB of data to UNINSTALL the program.

WTF?

I've refactored mysql so that I can enable IPV6 support. After some good feedback on the last release I modified everything to make dual stack support work (and got rid of the resolve locks in the process).

The tree is now public:
http://mysql.bkbits.net:8080/mysql-6.0-ipv6/

There are some issues with Windows that I need to resolve (which has more to do with broken Windows setups then problems in the code).

Instructions on how to build from Bitkeeper from here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/installing-source-tree.html

I still need to change the family defines to allow the IPV6 pieces to work, but that is just a couple of lines. I wanted to get the refactoring out of the way before I did that. …

A great architecture.

There are two common approaches for configuring web applications:

• Configuration file(s) in the web application's directory
• Storing configuration data in the database

What sort of data am I talking about:

• Email setup (where to send response form, error emails etc, whether to send mail to customers etc)
• Setup of things which need to vary between development and production - payment service provider configuration, setup of other third party integration things
• Error handler configuration (whether to display errors, where to log them, email them etc)
• Enabling / disabling features (for example, debug things)
• Visual stuff or branding (labels etc)

Clearly the database connection string needs to be stored somewhere too, but that can't be in the database for obvious reasons.
…

A quick note on mod_ndb: the official 1.0 release, and the first beta of 1.1, are now available for download at mod-ndb.googlecode.com. Mod_ndb is an Apache web server module that provides a Web Services gateway into MySQL Cluster. Its documentation is at MySQL Forge.

Mod_ndb supports MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 along with Apache 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2, and it is distributed in source code form only you build it for your particular versions of Apache and MySQL. One nice improvement in 1.1 is that it is easier to build mod_ndb for Apache 2.0, as the build system no longer has any dependencies on the old version of apxs.

Welcome to the 77th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. This is the last Log Buffer of 2007. . . a time for looking back at the year, looking ahead to the next, and generally focusing on time. It may not be the Oscars, but Firebird News is thrilled that Firebird is Sourceforge’s [...]

So I was reading Nate's PHP tip, and it got me thinking; he's basically describing bayesian session validity checks - what an awesome idea![1]. Here are my list of possible 'items' to form the test:

• Login IP address
• Login location (gathered courtesy of GeoIP)
• Operating System
• Web Browser
• Time of Day
• Origin of requests (both HTTP_REFERER and REQUEST_URI)

I was thinking of how damn accurately you could identify some specific cases of fraud though:

• "I only login from work" (time of day is always 9-5, location is always the same)

Each bit of information becomes more relevant the more frequently it occurs exclusively (or exclusively as part of a set). The only catch is that I would also need to identify the patterns …

The limits of my language means the limits of my world --Ludwig Wittgenstein

A properly designed star schema, along with appropriate performance optimizations, provides good performance and limitless scalability for the largest of the data warehouses. The main criteria for a properly designed star schema is that the dimension row counts are much smaller relative to the fact row counts. But there are dimensions, such as the customer dimension, that can be very large. These are called the monster dimensions, and stretch the star schema to the breaking point. These dimensions must be handled with caution, the bothersome data should be taken outside the data warehouse where appropriate.
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