I’ve teamed up with O’Reilly once again to do another webcast this coming January.  In it, I’ll provide a step-by-step live tutorial of setting up DRBD with MySQL on a couple of virtual servers.  After the live demo there will be time for Q&A as well, so hope you all can tune in.

Register here:  DRBD and MySQL – An HA Match Made In Heaven

That’s right — get your free 10-day trial! All the information I know is here:

http://bit.ly/37E9ld

But the basics are: No access to Rough Cuts or Downloads, for new subscribers only. It’s one of those “sign up and if you do not cancel after 10 days, we bill you” — and at $42.99 a month, that’s not a mistake you want to make. Must sign up by Nov. 24th.

To sign up now: https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/tryitfree

I was asked to send this information along, so I am…Now’s your chance to skim High Performance MySQL, among other high quality books!

I recently did a webcast for O’Reilly and Associates on MySQL Clustering Setup and configuration.

Click here to see a clip over at O’Reilly.

My O’Reilly webcast is now online at youtube. Comments welcome!

MySQL Replication is fairly simple to setup for the first time.  However over time maintenance can become troublesome.  At times errors show up in the error logs, or it can stop running altogether.  In fact MySQL Replication can fail in a much more insidious way, that is silently.  So what to do?

As it turns out there are specific reasons and causes for MySQL replication to get out of sync.  We’ll discuss what is and isn’t compliant in a MySQL Replicated environment, and then most importantly, we’ll discuss a tool that can help you verify your environment, and show you what is or isn’t in sync and why.

I’m presenting this webcast with O’Reilly on Thursday January 22.  If you’re interested, click here to register.

Last year O’Reilly released the 2nd Edition of the  MySQL Cookbook by Paul DuBois.  You can read my review here.

Whenever a publisher releases a 2nd Edition of a book, you know it was well received the first time around.  So that’s a good sign that the material has gotten people buying.  I would say in the computer reference and howto market, that’s a very good indication that the material is well written and relevant.  I certainly found it to be the case with this title.

If you’re looking for a quick & no nonsense howto book on MySQL development, look no further.  The book focuses on Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python and Java as examples.  So if you’re doing development, specifically web development, you’ll get …

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 …

Just thought I’d update you. We got quite a few good errata from readers, and I took a couple weekends and went through the book with a fine-toothed comb, catching typos and subtle errors that crept in at some point (TPC benchmarks were labeled as TCP benchmarks — did you catch that one?). I marked up my book and mailed it to O’Reilly, who went well above and beyond what they normally do for errata. Normally, once a book is in print they will fix only serious technical errors. They fixed everything, even going as far as rearranging page breaks and moving figures to improve readability.

The second printing is on Monday August 4th. Already! I think the book has been selling a lot better than anticipated. I know I am psyched to see it remain in the top couple thousand on Amazon. And they thought it was a big deal when it broke five thousand!

In other news, it’s going to be translated into Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese. So now …

As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …

I have an ingrained (possibly even genetic) aversion to stock images. Actually, not all stock: just the vacuous kind. You know what I mean: like the politically-correct, gender-balanced, racially-balanced, age-diverse ones where people are all smiling and pointing at a computer screen you can’t see. Ugh!

(Photo credit: istockphoto.com)

There are many reasons not to use images like this. I guess it’s okay in some situations — for example when you just want a smiling, attractive woman with a customer-service headset to reinforce that you’ve come to the right place for support. However, even these really don’t have to be stock images. One of my former employers used their own employees for such photos, almost exclusively, and it made the site much more real. And there are plenty of examples of companies that use photos of their own employees and get “realness” as a result. If I’m not mistaken, …