Diamond Notes

Over the holiday break I took some time to think about what to work on in this new year.  I have decided that one of the main focuses of my “project work” will be creating tools to automate tasks.  It is easy enough for someone to administer a couple of servers and it is even reasonable to administer twenty or thirty servers.  But as this number grows to forty, fifty or a hundred db servers an IT organization has two options: hire more and more DBAs or automate things.

I had heard some figures recently that are quite eye-opening.   The ratios can be astounding.  Over 1000:1 (servers:dba) ratio in one case.  And today I listened to an O’Reilly podcast of a MySQL Users Conference talk by Paul Tuckfield who is a dBA at YouTube.  If I understood correctly, in 2006, with YouTube getting 100 million hits a day there was three DBAs there.  Automation at this level is obviously very important.

I am not a “scripter”.  This is going to take some work.  But, in the long run, it will be worth it.  I am looking into options now.  My guess, at this point, is that it will be a combination of dsh (distributed shell), bash and perl.  I work in a Linux  based environment so cron can be used to automate timing of events.

Here’s to the new year.