In this month’s article we discuss Maatkit again, following up on our previous article last month. There are a whole host of backup and administrative tools including some to dump in parallel, search for tables, search for queries based on criteria and more.
Archive for category open-source
DBJ: More Maatkit
Jun 15
What’s your strongest suit? You may have heard the question before. It’s a simple and seemingly innocuous question, however by labeling and simplifying our skillset, we subtly pigeonhole our expertise unnecessarily. Perhaps a better question might be “How many hats can you wear?”, or “Are you a jack of all trades?”.
This month’s newsletter ponders this topic to present a different perspective on subject matter expertise.
In part two of our article on DRBD and High Availability, we take you step-by-step through setting up Sun’s Virtualbox software, creating a couple of VMs, and then installing CentOS on those. These two virtual Linux boxes then serve as two nodes in our DRBD mirrored disk setup which we use as a platform to install MySQL.
DRBD, MySQL and the Virtualbox Setup – Database Journal
Keep on the lookout for our third part in the series next month. In that issue we’ll explain how the Linux Heartbeat project can be used to control the whole setup, and provide automatic failover in the event that one node goes down.
DBJ: More MySQL Scaling
Nov 11
In this second part of our piece on scaling, we talk about running more instances of MySQL either on a single server or multiple servers, to get faster overall response for your queries. This will require some work with your application making decisions about where it will find its data or where it should make changes, but with some work you can drastically improve overall response for your applications.
In our latest newsletter we discuss what economists are dubbing the “medicine of austerity” aka paying the piper or tightening your belt. And we think that this medicine will surely include open source technologies.
In our latest newsletter we take a trip to the Brooklyn Flea, and talk with the purveyors not of homemade beer, but homemade beer making equipment. We share some insights at how enthusiasts, technology geeks, open source aficionados and passionate detail oriented folks in many niches share a common trait in common. That of ownership. Owning the details, the skills, and mastery over a topic or area. The proverbial “subject matter expert”.
Over the holidays I had the chance to catch up on some podcasts I hadn’t listened to. In particular Financial Times has an excellent weekly one called “Digital Business”. In the last one for 2008, Peter Whitehead interviews a few people to get their forcasts for 2009.
Of particular interest to our readers was his mention that Open Source will continue to grow in importance, as budgets get squeezed. Limited budgets mean looking at every dollar, so this month’s Open Insights issue 51, we talk about stretching your database dollar, and where and when open source database technologies may be right for you.
I just finished reading the recently released 2nd Edition of High Performance MySQL by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz & Derek Balling. I’ve posted a review here on Amazon.
Wow, that’s quite a list of authors, but when you look at the material, you see why. This book is a very indepth look at the MySQL server. Intended for the intermediate to advanced DBAs and developers who want to know the inner workings of the server, as well as how to use many of it’s advanced features.
For instance the chapter on replication was quite good. Given that you probably setup replication in five minutes, and are wondering weeks or months later why it’s not working, this chapter will give you some answers. Using non-deterministic functions? Mixing MyISAM and InnoDB tables in the same transactions? Seeing some errors in your slave error log that don’t make sense? After finding out that there is something wrong, you may be more surprised that your slave can be out of sync with the master, and not even let you know about it. The chapter recommends Maatkit’s mk-table-checksum as an assistant to identifying these problems.
All in all the book is superb, so take a look at the review for details, and go get yourself a copy!!
Just finished up O’Reilly’s Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston. The title is wide-reaching, covering backups at the operating system as well as on all the popular database platforms, including Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, Sybase, SQL Server and DB2. Preston has an amazing grasp of a spectrum of technologies and platforms, and as an Oracle & MySQL DBA myself, I’d use this as my backup reference text any day.
I’ve posted my review of Backup and Recovery over at Amazon.
Sun Shines on MySQL
Jan 16
As many of you may have already heard, Sun officially announced their purchase of MySQL today. After the last few years with Oracle pushing Linux and commodity hardware, Sun has certainly taken the hit. I guess this is their turn to hit back.
With MySQL 6.0 out, increasingly we find the full compliment of sophisticated database features in MySQL. But a lot of the devil is in the details. Where Oracle has had problems with the sheer size of the codebase, and addressing security vulnerabilities, and other bugs in a timely manner, MySQL has the problem of a mature codebase. Some of these features are newly available, and if my experiences with replication are any indication, often have hidden gotchas and “features” which are not emphasized in the literature.
The next question on my mind is, how does Oracle’s purchase and now ownership of Innobase impact the above purchase. It means a direct competitor owns a core component which provides transactional support to your database. A very good question.
Time will tell, so stay tuned.