Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Building your business

In the last two posts on how to build a successful consulting business I shared advice and tips on closing deals and managing and completing your engagements.

This post will look at where to focus your efforts in order to sustain your consulting business, and build skills.

Focus on your subject matter expertise

Being a subject matter expert takes years of education, and professional experience to build. It’s your most valuable asset. Build it, and use it. This is not to say there isn’t great value in …

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Managing & Completing Engagements

This is the second in a series of three articles on Consulting Essentials.
Read the previous post, Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Communicating well and knowing when to step in or stand back is the linchpin of successful consulting.
Some people have natural charm. If you’re one of these people you’ll find consulting is definitely for you. You’ll use that skill all the time as each new client brings a half dozen or a dozen new people to interact with.

If it doesn’t come easily, practice practice practice. Try to get out of your own head space, and hear what troubles …

Read the original article at Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Over the years, a lot of people have approached me asking how to become a tech consultant. What do I need to do to get started? How can I take my first step?

I also hear from managers and CEOs that have asked how I got my start, and how I keep the business running. What lessons from consulting can be applied to startups and small businesses? Having worked independently for many years I’ve built up my own cache of strategies and methods which I hope can be helpful to anyone looking to strike it out on their own.

This is the first of a series of three articles on consulting essentials. Part two covers …

Read the original article at Tyranny of a Google vote

Image by Hajo de Reijger, politicallyillustrated.com

For the past year I’ve been seeing headline blogs analyzing the effect of Google’s last algorithm update, dubbed the Panda. There was much talk of unfair relegation from the first page of Google search results, and general indignance by the SEO community.

As with any subject in which I only have cursory knowledge I didn’t think much of it. I thought that as long as I didn’t engage in link-buying and whatever is known as “black hat” tactics, the search engines would be fair. What I didn’t realise with Google was how subjective it has become in ranking websites. I was particularly tripped up in the …

Read the original article at Bulletproofing MySQL replication with checksums

Your MySQL replications running well? You might not even know if they aren’t. One of the scariest things about MySQL replication is that it can drift out of sync with the master “silently”. No errors, no warnings.

1. What and Why?

MySQL’s replication solution evolved as a statement based technology. Instead of sending actual block changes, MySQL just has to log committed transactions, and reapply those on the slave side. This affords a wonderful array of topologies and different uses, but has it’s drawbacks. The biggest occur when data does not get updated or changed in the …

Read the original article at 5 Ways to fortify MySQL replication

MySQL replication technology is powerful and flexible. But it doesn’t do everything perfectly all the time. You may experience trouble with the slaves falling behind the master, or want to scale horizontally by building new slaves automatically. Or you might need to build a slave without blocking the master database.

All of these goals can be achieved using some powerful tools. Here’s a quick guide to those tools and how to use them.

1. 1. Build new Replicas without Downtime

Something we’re sure you need to do quite often is to build new slaves. You can snapshot from another slave by bringing …

Read the original article at Easy MySQL replication with hotbackups

Setting up replication in MySQL is something we need to do quite often. Slaves die, replication fails, or tables and data get out of sync. Whenever we build a slave, we must start with a snapshot of all the data from the master database.

MySQLdump is the tried and true method of doing this, however it requires that we lock all the tables in the database. If we’re dumping a large database, this could be a significant period, where no writing can happen to our database for the duration of the backup. For many environments read-only is still an outage.

Enter hotbackups to the rescue. Percona comes with a tool that allows you to …

Read the original article at Autoscaling MySQL on Amazon EC2

Autoscaling your webserver tier is typically straightforward. Image your apache server with source code or without, then sync down files from S3 upon spinup. Roll that image into the autoscale configuration and you’re all set.


With the database tier though, things can be a bit tricky. The typical configuration we see is to have a single master database where your application writes. But scaling out or horizontally on Amazon EC2 should be as easy as adding more slaves, right? Why not automate that process?

Below we’ve set out to answer some of the questions you’re likely to face when setting up slaves against your master. We’ve included …

Read the original article at Oracle to MySQL – prepare to bushwhack through the open source jungle

I was recently approached by a healthcare company for advice on suitable database solutions capable of executing its new initiative. The company was primarily an Oracle shop so naturally, they began by shopping for possible Oracle solutions.

The CTO relayed his conversation with the Oracle sales rep, who at first recommended an Oracle solution that, expensive as it may have been, ultimately aligned with the company’s existing technology and experience. Unfortunately this didn’t match their budget and so predictably, the Oracle sales rep whipped out a MySQL-based solution as an alternative.

Having worked as an Oracle DBA throughout the dot-com years, I know the technology well. I also know …

Read the original article at A handy guide for PHP and MongoDB Web Development

What makes a beginner’s guide handy is when it speaks to your intuition. It anticipates the burning questions that follow from a newbie trying to grasp new concepts and it quickly answers them. PHP and MongoDB Web Development – Beginner’s Guide is one such guide.

I hadn’t heard of Packt Publishing or Rubayeet Islam before picking up this title and I must say I’m impressed. Based in Birmingham, with offices in Mumbai, part of Packt’s business model is to give part of the royalties earned from its books to the open …