Entries Tagged 'MySQL' ↓

Monday night I have the honor of speaking at the Boston MySQL Users Group. I will be talking about what I think is the most fundamental topic that a DBA needs to know — backups and recovery. It might be fundamental but it is also a subject that many people don’t understand. Join us for a great evening of pizza, meeting other MySQL’ers and a money back guarantee that I will give a great talk about backups!! Oh wait, there is no charge. Ah well, take a chance. We will have some fun!

The meeting is on MIT’s campus in building E51 room 372 (Cambridge, MA). The signup is here: http://mysql.meetup.com/137/

Looking forward to seeing you!

I landed in Boston this afternoon at a couple of minutes past one. Not sure if I went to the northeast part of the US when I was very young, but I haven’t been there since I can remember. Anyways, it was interesting. Traffic is something else and pedestrians seemingly just wander out into the road at random. Nice.

I am here to begin training for my new job. In July I will be opening an office for the Pythian Group (http://www.pythian.com) in Pensacola, FL. It is going to a great challenge. I will be here with Sheeri Cabral for two weeks and then travel to Ottawa for two weeks at corporate headquarters.

Tonight we went to a meeting that Sun put on somewhere here in Boston. I have no clue where .. we took the subway (two different lines) and then walked for a couple of blocks to a place called The Butcher Shop. It was a nice place. The meeting was a meet/greet type event for local people involved in the Sun world. There was some good discussion about MySQL, how it is being used and how to improve it. There was a panel of four people with Zack Urlocker from Sun/MySQL and two CEO’s from open-source based companies (sorry guys..I don’t remember your companies names..shame on me). Sheeri did a great job providing the MySQL community perspective.

It is good to know that Sun is taking the time to understand what people thinks about how to best develop MySQL. It isn’t a perfect process, but they are trying.

I will be offline for a few days.  This afternoon I leave Durham, North Carolina behind and going south once more to Pensacola, Florida — my hometown.  I am beginning a new job next week.  Since I haven’t asked if I can post about it I guess who my new employer is will remain anonymous for another few days.  Next Tuesday I will be flying up to the northeast corner of the U.S. to begin training.  Looking forward to it!

On another note..don’t forget the survey!  We are having great results but I would really like to ask everyone who uses MySQL in a professional role to please participate.  The larger the number of people who take ten minutes to fill out the survey the better the results.  Survey here: MySQL Survey

I would like to take a minute and publicly thank iContact (http://www.icontact.com) for the exciting work that I have done of late.  I had the honor to work with a talented group of people who are dedicated to their work.  Thanks all!!!

The survey is off and running!! As Mark Schoonover said, we have had over 100 surveys completed already. That is a great start. All good things seem to have challenges however and kwiksurveys, who is hosting the survey, has decided that this weekend would be great time to do upgrade to some newer faster servers. So that is good right? Well unfortunately they are saying the site will be down from Friday May 30th at 15:00 GMT through Monday June 1st, 09:00 GMT. So please keep this in mind!!

On towards 1000!!

With the extensive help of Mark Schoonover I have a survey online for those who use MySQL in their work. You might be a DBA or you might be a developer. If you use MySQL in your job I want your input!! I want as many people as possible to take the survey to get as accurate a picture of MySQL usage as I can. It will take less than ten minutes to take and this will help everyone to have a better idea of what is going on in the MySQL world.

I would encourage anyone to link to the survey to generate as much traffic as possible. I will have it online for three weeks, closing out the survey on June the 16th at midnight EST. The results of the survey will be published in the summer issue of MySQL magazine which will be available July the 15th.

The survey is hosted here: MySQL Magazine Survey

Thanks for your survey input!

I have been following the ZFS saga for quite a while. I have been hoping that somehow Sun could release ZFS under a compatible license for Linux. Well, there is hope yet. While it might be a slim hope, take a look at this:

http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/linux-and-sun-partnering/

Here’s hoping!! Debian with ZFS running MySQL … hmmmmmmmm. Can I have one for Christmas?

On May the 26th, with the help of Mark Schoonover, MySQL Magazine is putting online a survey for people who use MySQL on a daily basis as part of their job.  This survey will be open for three weeks and then I will gather the results and publish them in the Summer issue of MySQL Magazine which will be online July the 15th.

Now is the time to put in your suggestions so they can be incorporated into the survey. Don’t be shy!

I had a need to enable general query logging on a slave yesterday.  This makes for a very big file.  So, I needed to rotate this file at least daily.  Enter Google :)  And thanks to Jim Wood and Matt Reid, I have what I need.  Now I have it cron’ed to rotate out every night.  So thanks guys!! And here is a link to the post Matt wrote about it:

http://themattreid.com/wordpress/?p=34

We have been running MySQL server 5.0.45 in production here since December. Not a hitch until April the 4th. Then, while I was on vacation of course, one of our masters servers seg-faulted and died. I looked into things, but really couldn’t tell much. The one odd thing was that I had MyISAM tables marked crashed in the error log BEFORE the actual crash. While I thought that was very odd, I didn’t put two and two together. Not to give things away, but the crashed MyISAM table was the big clue. The next week I left for Santa Clara and the MySQL Users Conference on the 8th. I was only in the office for two days before I was off to California so the crash on the 4th probably didn’t get as much attention as it should have.

As I have blogged about, the conference was great. I returned home on Friday, the 18th. Turns out while we were on the plane that the same server crashed again. This was twice in two weeks. Exact same (non) symptoms — ie nothing obvious. I had talked to a couple of people at the conference about the situation and the lack of any discernible evidence (other than the MyISAM tables). Both people I talked to said it would probably be hardware. By this point I already thought so myself, but it just reinforced my belief. I thought it was either hardware or my servers just miss me when I am not around! We had set up another server to be the slave of the newly promoted master that replaced the crashed server so there was no real rush to get the hardware from the colo. Yesterday we went to the colo for some work and brought back the server that had crashed I plugged it in on our workbench and started up memtest. This morning when I came in … eight memory errors.

So, if you have MyISAM tables and they get marked as crashed in your error log and the server didn’t actually crash you should consider it very likely you have some type of hardware problem. Memory just happens to be the most likely candidate.

Hope this helps someone when they don’t know why the server crashed!!

I have a new idea. Actually, to give credit were credit is due, my lovely wife had a good idea. She mentioned it to me a week or so before the spring issue of the magazine came out. Too late for that issue. However, I am going to implement it for the summer issue of the magazine.

So here is what happens. Almost every day I get emails, comments on my blog, or linked-in emails about MySQL DBA positions. I know that many companies are hurting, looking for dbas and MySQL proficient developers. The magazine is targeted at MySQL DBAs and developers. So when someone downloads the magazines you are almost assured of reaching your target audience.

Hmmm…why didn’t I think of this before? A natural match. Now, I don’t want to turn this into a Monster job site, but I think the magazine can offer a service. So, if your company is looking for a MySQL DBA or a developer send me an email at bmurphy AT paragon-cs.com and we can talk. There will be a very reasonable listing fee. The magazine currently comes out once a quarter. In addition to having a job listing in the magazine I will put together a page on the website (http://www.mysqlzine.net) for the job posting.