Recently we went through an exercise where we moved all of our database masters between data centers. We planned on doing this online with minimal user impact. Obviously when performing this sort of action there are a variety of considerations such as cache consistency and other pieces of shared state in stores like HBase, but the focus of this post will be primarily on MySQL.

    During this move we had a number of constraints. As mentioned above this was to be online when serving production traffic with minimal user impact. In aggregate we service hundreds of thousands of database queries per second. Additionally we needed to encrypt all data transferring between data centers. MySQL replication supports encryption, but connections to the servers themselves present several challenges. Specifically, from a performance standpoint the handshake to establish a connection across a WAN can impact latency if …

Read the original article at Why I Wrote the Book – Oracle and Open Source

Back in the late 90′s New York City was deep in the dot-com boom. Silicon Alley was being born, and a thousand internet startups were sprouting. Everyone was hiring, it was an exciting time to work in technology!

Trend Spotting Circa 2000

As an independent consultant, I had the opportunity to work at quite a few startups. The technology stack was identical at almost all of them. Sun Microsystems hardware, Apache webservers, and Oracle on the backend. The database was always the sticking point, and developers struggled to get their queries right.

It was an interesting role to hold. Most career DBAs worked …