Companies know they need a database administrator, but they probably don’t have any clue about what they actually do. The primary duty for a MySQL server DBA is not waking up in a panic because the phone rang so much it fell off the nightstand during their on-call nights. Outside of that situation, a DBA’s function typically revolves around making sure the data is safe, sound and in one piece when the business needs it. Organizations use different database setups to try to confuse new database administrators, even though they typically involve the same day-to-day tasks.

Monitoring and Optimization

When database administrators get to work, they creep quietly into the building in an attempt to avoid end users chasing them down with not-so-priority problems. After a sufficient amount of caffeine, they fire up their monitoring programs to see whether the …

In this virtual course, you will learn how to get from a single database server to a scalable cluster, or from a brittle MySQL replication system to a transparent, manageable Continuent Tungsten cluster. 

We discuss the benefits of leveraging Continuent Tungsten clustering with MySQL, and walk you through the steps to implement a Continuent Tungsten cluster in Amazon EC2.

So last night I had to resized one of my Xen partitions. So what was the magic to make this happen?


dd if=/dev/zero count= >> /var/lib/xen/images/shiitake.dsk


Then? I need to increase the partition map for my disk:


fdisk /dev/xvda


What did I do in fdisk? I deleted the partition, and then recreated it with the new available blocks. Of course the machine was running at the time. What is life without a few risks? But I have to ask myself, why doesn't fdisk have a resize command? I swear that tool hasn't changed in well over a decade.

I am running LVM so then I had to:


pvresize /dev/xvda2
lvresize -L +5G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00


And finally since the filesystem is ext3:

e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
…