Sean Hull

MySQL is a great database for web-facing applications, however, it tends to be a bit rough around the edges. Enter Maatkit, a great toolkit with a bewildering array of command line tools that fill the gap where MySQL’s native tools leave off. From data replication to query profiling and optimizing, Maatkit has tools to make […]

Introduction MySQL has an interesting architecture that sets it apart from some other enterprise database systems.  It allows you to plug in different modules to handle storage.  What that means to end users is that it is quite flexible, offering an interesting array of different storage engines with different features, strengths, and tradeoffs.   In […]

MySQL has an interesting architecture that sets it apart from some other enterprise database systems. It allows you to plug in different modules to handle storage. What that means to end users is that it is quite flexible, offering an interesting array of different storage engines with different features, strengths, and tradeoffs. Introduction MySQL has […]

Heartbeat automates all the moving parts and can work as well with the MySQL master-master active/passive solution as well as it can with the MySQL & DRBD solution. It manages the virtual IP address used by the database, directs DRBD to become primary, or relinquish primary duties, mounts the /dev/drbd0 device, and starts/stops MySQL as […]

Introduction DRBD is a Linux project to provide a real time distributed filesystem.  Part two of this series will dig deep into a real-world installation example.  We’ll use Sun’s virtualbox software to create a couple of VMs, then configure those VMs with DRBD, and finally install and test MySQL running on volumes sitting on DRBD. […]

Introduction DRBD is a Linux project to provide a real-time distributed filesystem. Although it has some clustering support, it’s not really a true clustered filesystem like OCFS2 or GFS2. What it provides is a mirrored copy of a block device across a network. HA with MySQL Replication MySQL high availability is often implemented with its […]

Usually an article like this one will start out with a technical word "scaling".  Unfortunately like health care reform, everyone can’t always agree on what they mean by it, or even what the goal is.  So, I deliberately chose not to use the word, and use the non-technical words that we can all agree on.  […]

Usually an article like this one will start out with the technical word "scaling".  Unfortunately like health care reform, everyone can’t always agree on what they mean by it, or even what the goal is.  So, I deliberately chose not to use that word, and opted for non-technical words that we can all agree on.  […]

Many articles on database administration take the perspective of trying to help you do your job better.  We thought we might take a different tack and poke a little fun at some of more egregious mistakes we’ve seen over the years at IT shops.   Taken together we think these seven areas hit on some […]

Last month we talked about some things to set and tune in a new MySQL database installation.  We touched on connections, query cache, temp tables, session memory, and the slow query log. This second part in the series hits on some other very important things to tune in a new MySQL database.   6. Innodb […]

MySQL can be installed and up and running in a matter of minutes with RPMs or even quicker with tools like xampp. However, there are so many dials to turn, and options to set that even experienced DBAs can feel overwhelmed. With that in mind, we’d like to focus your attention on ten areas that […]

Introduction MySQL’s unique architecture allows for plugin storage engines.  So for example, there is the MyISAM storage engine, the original one, and there is the ARCHIVE storage engine, which has characteristics that make it suitable for storing archived data.  And of course we know the InnoDB storage engine, with its transactional capabilities.  So it makes […]