Please read the luculent Safe Harbor Statement at the bottom of this page....

We released our official earnings on Thursday last week, after pre-announcing the news one week prior alongside the announcement of our intent to acquire MySQL.

Our second quarter financial announcement came down to this: we doubled our profitability compared to a year ago, with $260 million in net income on revenues of $3.6 billion, while generating $336 million in cash from operations. We also repurchased $750 million of our own shares within the quarter, and reaffirmed our guidance for the full year of low to mid …

This is a follow-up to part I from last week. You've considered what you want to do, you've looked at your soft skills, and you still want to be a DBA. How then do you get started?

The first thing to do is decide which platform you're going to focus on. Each "flavor" has its own proprietary tools and commands. While all share a basic SQL language foundation, DBCC CHECKDB() doesn't run on MySQL and DESCRIBE doesn't get you anything SQL Server. Likewise, SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) don't help you with Oracle and if you're looking for " …

Now you may not believe me, but there actually are situations when DRBD is not the right choice for meeting your storage needs. Since I’ve been asked to compile some of these and present them here, let’s take a look.

Don’t use DRBD when…

• All or most of your data is static. Front-end web servers are a prime example for this. Even though they usually serve highly dynamic content these days, your PHP documents and Perl scripts and JSP’s usually don’t change that often. Using DRBD for that type of data isn’t much use. Use DRBD for your backend store instead. On the front end, you’ll do fine with rsync, although it …

Some applications require direct access to a block device, without an intermediate file system. Some Oracle and MySQL configurations are an example, as are some Xen setups, or IET. Can you do this with DRBD? Sure you can.

However, you need to fulfill two prerequisites:

1. Your application can’t access DRBD while it’s in the Secondary role. So, you must make sure DRBD is Primary before your application attempts using that device.
2. The user in whose context your application runs needs read/write access to that device.

Your cluster manager, when configured properly, normally takes care of item #1 for you. #2 is a little trickier:
Normally, DRBD’s device nodes are owned by root:disk, with permission bits set to 0660 (rw-rw----). So in order to allow your application to use the device, you have two options:

• Add …

Vani and I both started using "Life Balance":http://www.llamagraphics.com/LB/LifeBalanceTop.html for our todo lists in the last week or two. It's great so far.

One of the items I added was a occasionally recurring "File a bug report" task.

Writing a "good bug report":http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html is a relatively quick and easy way to help the authors and maintainers of the software you use make it better.

I was working a bit with "Xen":http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ on Fedora Core 5 some days ago and found out that the default scripts don't deal nicely with anything but the most basic net configuration. "Hello bugzilla":https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=193322.

MySQL is one of the nicest projects to file bug reports for, because they are very nice about "following up":http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=19498 and actually …

Vani and I both started using "Life Balance":http://www.llamagraphics.com/LB/LifeBalanceTop.html for our todo lists in the last week or two. It's great so far.

One of the items I added was a occasionally recurring "File a bug report" task.

Writing a "good bug report":http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html is a relatively quick and easy way to help the authors and maintainers of the software you use make it better.

I was working a bit with "Xen":http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ on Fedora Core 5 some days ago and found out that the default scripts don't deal nicely with anything but the most basic net configuration. "Hello bugzilla":https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=193322.

MySQL is one of the nicest projects to file bug reports for, because they are very nice about "following up":http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=19498 and actually …