For any production MySQL Database system, running RAID is a given these days. Do you know what RAID your database is? Are you sure?. Ask for quantifiable reproducible output from your systems provider or your System Administrator.

As a consultant I don’t always know the specific tools for the clients deployed H/W, but I ask the question. On more the one occasion the actual result differed from the clients’ perspective or what they were told, and twice I’ve discovered that clients when asked if their RAID was running in a degraded mode, it actually was and they didn’t know.

You can read about various benchmarks at MySQL blogs such as BigDBAHead and MySQL Performance Blog however getting first hand experience of your actually RAID …

OSCON moves this year from Portland to San Jose.

As one the community panel for Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem I also have a speaker discount which you can combine with O’Reilly having also extended early bird registration until June 23.

Be sure to add the os09fos code for an additional 20% off, and be sure to shout me a drink there.

"An ecosystem is a unit of interdependent organisms which share the same habitat." - Definition: Ecosystem on Wikipedia .

Software comprises a symbiotic ecosystem that functions in much the same way as ecosystems found in nature. The various elements interact with one another, thereby providing a complete solution to users. ISVs and SaaS companies are part of the ecosystem of open source software (OSS), yet some of these companies are referred to as vampires, leeches, parasites and freeloaders because they don’t give back code to the community software.

Pardon my quick digression, but parasites are valuable members of any ecosystem. They do the dirty work of cleaning the ecosystem and turning waste into valuable food and fertilizer for the ecosystem. Consider, for example how your neighborhood …

If you had to configure a Wordpress MU installation without access to any details of your MySQL Configuration, what would you do?

What top five configuration settings would you use?

I asked the community this question, see For MySQL DBA fame and glory. Prize included and a number of brave soles responded for a chance to win a free copy of MySQL Administrators Bible by MySQL Community She-BA Sheeri Cabral.

There is no perfect answer and of course you would want to set more then five options, however the purpose of the competition was to seek what people would do with limited information and a limited choice of …

Lately, there has been some talk about how users who do not feed code changes back into the open source codebase are "leeches " or "freeloaders ". This perspective demonstrates an incredible naiveté. Whether your customers never feedback a single line of code, they are adding tremendous value by the mere fact that they use your product. Let me explain.

First, what is more valuable: (1) a wonderful open source application used by 10 users who all provide code back to the community version; or (2) a closed source product with 200M users (think Microsoft Word)? Users are the most valuable asset a piece of software can have.

Much of this value is driven by the network effect . The more people who …

By now everybody and their neigbour has realized that indeed Everything is a funky dns problem, Frank is giving talks about it at ZooCamp, and Serge figured out the hard way the downtime of planet.geekdinner.be was due to a dns problem :)

But I told you different things before ... and some of you listened others are still reinventing the wheel as we go ...

Matt A. points out that the OpenBravo folks realized that one should try to build on top of Open Source projects rather than modify core code ..

Wonder where he read that before : …

I’ve decided to give people two more days for a chance to win a free MySQL Book — Sheeri Cabral’s MySQL Administrators Bible.

I have had five people so far provide recommendations for a simple MySQL configuration question as stated in For MySQL DBA fame and glory. Prize included. Shlomi Noach the current front runner.

Try your MySQL Performance Tuning skills. This is a good opportunity for new MySQL DBA’s and experienced DBA’s to provide basic input.

I came across the following configuration today on a Production MySQL system (5.0.67) running 30+ blogs using Wordpress MU.

$ cat /etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
set-variable = max_connections=500
safe-show-database

No I did not truncate the output. I could say I’ve seen worse, but that’s a stretch.

So the quiz and a prize for the best response, for the next 48 hours I’ll accept your comments as responses to this post for the top 5 settings you would add, and additionally what information you may need to add these settings. Bonus points for giving a reason why you would add the settings as well.

For example, I’ll give you the most obvious.

key_buffer_size = ????

To determine a key_buffer_size to start with I would look at the size of all Indexes via I_S, and combine with some estimate of growth, say 2x-5x.

For the best answer …

"The support model doesn’t scale well." - Matthew Aslett, The 451 Group

How do you make money with open source? I’ve written about open source business models previously, but I thought it might be valuable to quantify the impact of open source on your business model. The following analyzes the differences between a closed source model and an open source + paid support business model, using an apples-to-apples comparison based on a $100 license fee for the closed source product.

Option 1: Closed source
License Fee: $100
Annual Maintenance & Support: $18 (18%)
5-Year Present Value of License + Support: $175 (1)
Conversion Rate: 100%
Userbase: 1X
Relative Revenue: $175

Option 2: Open source
License Fee: $0
Annual Maintenance & Support: $18 (2)
5-Year …

If you can do either of these on your MySQL production server, you need to correct immediately.

1. Login directly to your MySQL server as the ‘root’ Linux Operating System user. For example:

$ ssh root@server-name
Password:  ************

2. Connect to MySQL database as the ‘root’ MySQL user without a password.

$ mysql -uroot

Here are the 60 second fixes to address these major security flaws.
To disable direct root access to your server, first ensure you can login as a normal user, then su - or sudo su - appropriately. Then, disable ssh root access with the following configuration change.

$   vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
    # ensure this is commented out and set to no
    PermitRootLogin no

$   /etc/init.d/sshd restart

This will stop any brute force attack on your server by automated bots and password generators.

Second, the default installation …