At PalominoDB, we are not just another remote DBA; we are an integral part of your webops, DBA and BI teams.

Blog

Videos of MySQL presentations at MySQL Sunday and Oracle Open World

At the last minute Giuseppe convinced me to bring my video cameras, and so I was able to get some of the presentations at MySQL Sunday recorded, as well as some of the MySQL related presentations at Oracle OpenWorld.  As usual, they are hosted on YouTube and free.  Here's the list:

Call for Papers for the O'Reilly MySQL Conference

The call for papers for the O'Reilly MySQL Conference is now open, and closes October 25th.  Submit your proposal now at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/user/proposal/propose/cfp/126!

Liveblogging: Leveraging Hadoop to Augment MySQL Deployments by Sarah Sproehnle, Cloudera, Hadoop Instructor

Sarah Sproehnle is an excellent speaker, so I was excited to see her speak about Hadoop, which I know very little about...so here's the liveblogging:

Hadoop is an "open source framework for storing and processing data on a cluster of computers."  Processing is key -- analysis of data.

MySQL 5.5 is now in RC, and will be GA soon!

Earlier this year, the beta of MySQL 5.5 was announced.  We all felt excited about the changes in 5.5, especially the large performance improvements.  However, many of us proceeded with caution; version 5.4 was previously announced with similar fanfare and we had yet to see a GA version.

Sheeri has joined PalominoDB

About six weeks ago I posted about leaving Pythian. I had a month off in which I spent quality time with my husband, including packing up our apartment to move two blocks away. I also spent some time doing some planning and organizing for OpenSQLCamp Boston, happening in 6 weeks. Many people have been wondering what my next move is.

Where we've been...

You might notice that I haven’t blogged in oh, 2 years.  How remiss of me.  The only defense I have is that we’ve been non-stop busy!  Since then we’ve built our client portfolio, brought in two new team members, presented at MySQL Conference and still managed to get into any number of shenanigans.   Still, that is no excuse.  Let me give a summary of some of the interesting things we’ve been up to:

MySQL Partitioning

I’ve been setting up partitioning for various customers lately. The goals primarily have been easy purging of large growth tables and keeping indexes small enough to stay in memory and manageable. These have all been range partitions on dates, which is a rather common requirement. As you’ve probably noticed in previous posts, I absolutely hate environments where people let their tables grow like blackberry bushes. While doing research, I found the following links to be very helpful:

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/testing-partitions-large-db.html

MySQL Checksum

This is another tool in the same toolkit as archiver. I just saw a great blog post on it at http://blog.arabx.com.au/?p=883. Documentation can be found at http://mysqltoolkit.sourceforge.net/doc/mysql-checksum-filter.html. This is an invaluable tool for ensuring your replicated tables are staying in sync, something that MySQL replication does not do. Tables will drift and if you are dealing with critical data for read support, reports or backups, this will prove invaluable.

Version Consistency

Everyone puts lip service to the concept of keeping versions consistent between servers but it is consistently one of the most broken best practices I see amongst my clients. The problems with such inconsistency are legion, and I’ll point out a few here.

MySQL Toolkit – Archiver

The MySQL Toolkit can be found at http://mysqltoolkit.sourceforge.net/. It is coded and maintained by Baron Schwartz (www.xaprb.com). I’ve been using the archiver tool he wrote lately, and wanted to share this tool. In every web environment I’ve worked in, there is data that is collected for analysis and that grows quite rapidly. User activity logs in particular can quickly grow out of control, and generally have no place in a front-end database after a certain amount of time.

Website by Digital Loom