The Problem

Developers often need to have a development database copy of the live production system you are using in able to allow them to test their code and to test new functionality and make schema changes to the database for this new functionality to work.

That’s normal and happens everywhere. A typical DBA task is to make a copy of the live system, sometimes to remove any confidential or sensitive information which perhaps the development database users should not be able to see, and then give them access to this development instance. The developers then “hack away”, changing their code and perhaps things in the database until they are ready to put these new changes into production when they then come along and discuss how to apply these changes into the live systems.

Once the development database has been created it soon becomes stale so often the developers want a new up to date copy …

Greetings from Sankt Augustin, Germany! I've arrived by train today and just returned from the FrOSCon venue, which will start tomorrow. The organizers are still busy with the preparations, but things already seem to be in good shape.

It was a mild and sunny evening today. Hopefully it will be the same tomorrow again, so we can enjoy a relaxed BBQ outside! The social event at FrOSCon is always a nice opportunity to meet and talk with fellow open source enthusiasts, users and developers.

And finally some good news for those of you who can't make it to FrOSCon this year: there will be live video streams from selected lecture rooms! So you will be able to attend the OpenSQL Camp sessions virtually - just head over to http://live.froscon.org/ and select room "HS6". It'll be …

Scribd is a top 100 site on the web and one of the largest sites built using Ruby on Rails. As one of the first rails sites to reach scale, we’ve built a lot of infrastructure and solved a lot of challenges to get Scribd to where it is today. We actively try to push the envelope and have contributed substantial work back to the open source community.

Scribd has an agile, startup culture and an unusually close working relationship between engineering and ops. You’ll regularly find cross-over work at Scribd, with ops people writing application-layer code and engineers figuring out operations-level problems. We think we’re able to make that work because of the uniquely talented people we have on the team.

To allow us to keep scaling, we’re now looking to add a strong, experienced operations guru to the …

In some environments using a distro package management system may* provide benefits including handling dependencies and providing a simpler approach when there are no dedicated DBA or SA resources.

However, the incorrect use can result in pain and in this instance production downtime. Even with dedicated resources at an unnamed premium managed hosting provider, the simple mistake of assumption resulted in over 30 minutes of unplanned downtime during peak time.

One of the disadvantages of using a system such as rpm is the lack of control in managing the starting and stopping of your MySQL instance, and the second is unanticipated package dependency upgrades.

So what happened with this client. When attempting to use the MySQL client on the production server, I got the following error.

$ mysql -uxxx -p
error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or …

Unlike previous years when the number of conferences with MySQL content diminishes after the O’Reilly MySQL and OSCON conferences (Open SQL Camp excluded), this year has a lot on offer.

This month:

• Open SQL Camp Europe Edition on Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd August

Upcoming next month in September:

• MySQL Sunday at Oracle Open World on September 18 in San Francisco includes 4 tracks and around 15 quality speakers. (Big numbers of attendees also rumored but yet unconfirmed).
• The inaugural Surge Scalability conference in Baltimore will include presentations by myself and …

A common observation for many LAMP stack products is the use of poor MySQL security practices. Even for more established products such as Wordpress don’t always assume that the provided documentation does what it best for you. As per my earlier posts where I detailed installation instructions and optimal permissions for both WordPress and Mediawiki, and not just directed readers to online documentation.

In this post I will detail why GRANT ALL is bad.

Let’s start with what GRANT ALL [PRIVILEGES] provides. As per the MySQL 5.1 Reference …

Within a few hours my post Installing Mediawiki on Oracle Enterprise Linux LAMP stack got 5 negative votes.

Wow, I’d be glad if these people could felt so passionately about all the other CRUD on Planet MySQL that has ZERO to do actually do with MySQL.

Using a LAMP product, and providing instructions for operation can’t be a negative voting offense. So it can only be the words “Oracle Enterprise Linux”.

For those negative people out there that care enough to physically mark blogs let me share some facts with you. RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the most widely used and support platform for production MySQL environments. CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) provide via the freedom of Open Source, their own offerings of RHEL with various other features including …

A company wiki can be easily configured in under 10 minutes using Mediawiki the open source LAMP software that powers the top 10 website Wikipedia.

A company wiki is an ideal means for a centralized and user contributed documentation system. The following steps show you how to download, configure and get your Mediawiki site operational.

Software Pre-Requisites

• Installing MySQL on Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Installing a LAMP Stack on Oracle Enterprise …

I get asked this question often. It was mentioned again recently in a NYTECH executive breakfast with RedHat CIO Lee Congdon.

The short answer is No.

There is clear evidence that in the short to medium term Oracle will continue to promote and enhance MySQL. Some of these indicators include:

• EU 10 point commitment in December 2009 – See Oracle Makes Commitments to Customers, Developers and Users of MySQL
• MySQL Conference April 2010 – Opening keynote by Edward Screven State of the Dolphin
• Oracle Magazine Jul/Aug 2010 – Interview with Edward Screven …

I will be joining a great list of quality speakers including John Allspaw, Theo Schlossnagle, Rasmus Lerdorf and Tom Cook at Surge 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland on Thu 30 Sep, and Fri Oct 1st 2010.

My presentation on “The most common MySQL scalability mistakes, and how to avoid them.” will include discussing various experiences observed in the field as a MySQL Consultant and MySQL Performance Tuning expert.

Abstract:

The most common mistakes are easy to avoid however many startups continue to fall prey, with the impact including large re-design costs, delays in new feature releases, lower staff productivity and less then ideal ROI. All growing and successful sites need to achieve higher Availability, seamless Scalability and proven Resilience. Know the right MySQL …