Problem: You've a large table (or two) in a database on a partition that's running out of space, and you want to see if you can move that table to another drive.

Solution: Well, several actually. No silver bullet, but several options, some with conditions and some that require preparation. Let's look at some background information first.

How MySQL Stores Data 

OK, that's somewhat of an ambitious heading for an incidental paragraph or two, so to tone it back a bit, I'll summarise briefly.

• The data directory is where MySQL stores databases, and it's set by the datadir server option. Each database is stored in a subdirectory of the data directory. You can also save a considerable amount of space without moving data around, by …

I've previously written about AppArmor and MySQL, and how to change MySQL's default file locations on systems with AppArmor enabled. Ubuntu and SUSE ship with AppArmor enabled, but some other distributions such as Oracle Linux don't, along with related distrubutions such as Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora. Rather, these other distributions use another mandatory access control system called SELinux. 

Here's some technical detail that might come in handy later.

SELinux uses concepts such as types and domains. Types belong to resources such as files and ports; these are the "objects" in SELinux. Domains contain the "subjects" (processes) and object types that are associated with each other in some way, for example because they are all related to …

MySQL accesses files in various places on the file system, and usually this isn't something to worry about. For example, in a standard MySQL 5.5 installation on Ubuntu, the data goes in /var/lib/mysql, and the socket is a file in /var/run/mysqld. It puts configuration files in /etc, logs and binaries in various locations, and it even needs to access some operating system files such as /etc/hosts.allow.

This is all very well until you start trying to be clever and get MySQL to access other parts of the file system. After all, you can configure the location of data, log files, socket, and so on, so why shouldn't you use those settings to optimize your system? Unfortunately, on many modern Linux distributions, it's not that always easy.

Take Ubuntu, for example. Ubuntu comes with something called AppArmor, a kernel-integrated application security system that controls how applications can access the file system. This goes above …

I have been a little bit stubborn on my concession that cloud computing is really going to be the wave of the future. Though lately I have been playing with a lot of cloud related technologies and am hooked. Spin up 10 (or 100) Linux servers in a minute from a web page with no real systems management skills and then you start seeing the power of cloud computing. As I try to get smarter on cloud computing I compiled the following list of resources that I have found helpful.  If you have a great cloud resource please feel free to let me know what I am missing on.

Cloud and Virtualization Guides and Whitepapers

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