Effective June 1, 2011, MySQL certification exams will be offered exclusively through a new test delivery partner — Pearson VUE — and will no longer be available through Prometric. This will consolidate all Oracle Certification exams within the operations of a single testing vendor so we can provide better service and global testing coverage for these Oracle certification exams. Pearson VUE currently has over 5,000 test centers worldwide in 165 countries.

To help prepare you for this transition, here are some important dates for you to be aware of:

• If you are currently following a certification path and are planning to take an exam on/after June 1: Registration has began at Pearson VUE on May 16, 2011 for all scheduled exams on or after June 1. Visit pearsonvue.com/oracle to create a new web account and get started.
• …

Listening to the OurSQL podcast: Repli-cans and Repli-can’ts got me thinking, what are the issues with MySQL replication that Sarah and Sheeri didn’t have the time to include in their episode. Here’s my list:
Replication Capacity Index This is a concept introduced by Percona in last year’s post: Estimating Replication Capacity which I revisited briefly during my presentation at this year’s MySQL Users Conference. Why is this important? Very …

Interesting question on human mistakes was posted on the DBA Managers Forum discussions today.

As human beings, we are sometimes make mistakes. How do you make sure that your employees won’t make mistakes and cause downtime/data loss/etc on your critical production systems?

I don’t think we can avoid this technically, probably working procedures is the solution.
I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I typed my thoughts and as I was finishing, I thought that it makes sense to post it on the blog too so here we go…

The keys to prevent mistakes are low stress levels, clear communications and established processes. Not a complete list but I think these are the top things to reduce the number of mistakes we make managing data infrastructure or for that matter working in any critical environment be it IT administration, …

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Can database performance improvements be achieved with zero code changes? Learn how to use one simple advanced technique to make better MySQL indexes and improve your queries by 500% or more. Even with a highly indexed schema as shown in our 10 table join example, significant improvements in performance can be achieved.

This presentation introduces the approach for correct identification and verification of problem SQL statements and then describes the means of identifying index choices for optimization. Then discussed is not only how to apply indexes to improve query performance, but how to apply better indexes and provide even great performance gains.

This presentation …

If you use a Mac, and you are dealing with many similar tasks at once, like examining many database servers in different terminals, you may like this one.
I have been using iTerm 2 for a while, and my handling of parallel tasks has improved a lot. (No, I am not talking about Parallel replication, although I have applied this trick while testing that technology as well.)
iTerm2 has some cool features, and probably the most striking one is split panes. That alone would be a good reason for giving iTerm2 a try. But the one that I use the most, often in combination with Split Panes, is called Send Input to all tabs.
Here is how it works.
Let's say I need to …

I have just seen Limiting table disk quota in MySQL by Shlomi Noach, and I could not resist.
You can actually implement a disk quota using an updatable view with the CHECK OPTION.
Instead of giving the user access to the table, you give access to the view (at least for inserting, see the caveat at the end), and you will get a genuine MySQL error when the limit is reached.

drop table if exists logs;
create table logs (t mediumtext) engine=innodb;

drop function if exists exceeded_logs_quota ;
create function exceeded_logs_quota() 
returns boolean
deterministic
return (
    select CASE 
           WHEN (DATA_LENGTH + INDEX_LENGTH) > (25*1024) 
           THEN TRUE ELSE FALSE 
 …

I was listening today to the OurSQL Episode 36: It's Not Our (De)fault! Part 1. As usual, Sheeri and Sarah are very informational and entertaining while explaining the innards of MySQL and their best practices.
Being a DBA oriented show, there was an omission in this podcast. There was no mention of custom groups that you can have for your my.cnf. This is mostly useful for developers. If your application requires some specific settings, instead of using a separated configuration file, you can use a different group, and then instruct your client applications to use that group.
By default, all client applications read the "[client]" group.
But you can tell your client to read a group that you can call whatever you like.
For example, with this configuration file,

[client] …

So your not a MySQL DBA, but you have to perform like one. If you have a production environment that’s running now, what are the first things you do when it’s not running or reported as not running?

1. Are the MySQL processes running? (i.e. mysqld and mysqld_safe)
2. Can you connect locally via cli?
3. What’s in the MySQL error log?
4. What are current MySQL threads doing? Locked? long running? how many? idle sources?
5. Can you connect remotely via cli?
6. Verify free diskspace?
7. Verify system physical resources?
8. If this is a slave, is MySQL replication running? Is it up to date?
9. What is the current MySQL load, e.g. reads/writes/throughput/network/disk etc?
10. What is the current InnoDB state and load? (based on if your using InnoDB)

After you do this manually more then once you should be scripting these commands to …

While working on a deployment we came across a nasty surprise. In hindsight it was avoidable, but it never crossed our minds it could happen. I'll share the experience so when you face a similar situation, you'll know what to expect.
ScenarioTo deploy the changes, we used a pair of servers configured to replicate with each other (master-master replication). There are many articles that describe how to perform an ALTER TABLE with minimum or no downtime using MySQL replication. The simple explanation is:

1. Set up a passive master of the database you want to modify the schema. 
2. Run the schema updates on the passive master.
3. Let replication to catch up once the schema modifications are done.
4. Promote the passive master as the new active master.

The details to make this work will depend on each individual situation and are too extensive for the purpose of this article. A …

I just have to chime in about how happy I am with my new job. I now work for Blue Gecko, as of August 30th. My role is a Senior Database and Systems Administrator. Blue Gecko is based out of Seattle though I'll be working out of my home in New Hampshire, albeit with my frequent travels to Seattle for family reasons, this will work out quite well.

Already in the last week, I've engaged in several tasks, all of which have been very interesting problems to solve. Not only that, but I've spoken with several existing and potential customers and never realized I really enjoy consulting with and acquiring customers-- hearing what problems they need to solve and being able to ascertain quickly how to solve those problems, making the customer look forward to engaging with us.

Who is Blue Gecko?

Based out of Seattle, their website states ( …