Linux System Admins Blog

Here’s an interesting one, what if you have a MySQL replication setup and the slave stops replicating with a syntax error? The slave should be executing the exact same commands as the master, right? Well, as it turns out, yes and no. There is a bug in MySQL that has been fixed in 5.0.56 according [...]

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We recently came across a problem with Cacti and the MySQL counters. For those of you who don’t know how to integrate MySQL statistics into Cacti have a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/. These templates are a great way to gain some insight into how your MySQL database servers perform. The templates are actually PHP pages [...]

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MySQL conference notes on cloud computing shoot out text summary atranscript
Lew Tucker, Cloud CTO, sun
Monty Taylor, MySQL Drissel Geek, Sun
Jeremy Zawodny, MySQL hacker, craigslist
Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda
Thorsten von Ficon, CTO, Rightscale
Prashant Malik, Cassandra Dude, Facebook
Mike Culver, Evangerlist, Amazon Web Services
Some interesting subjects touched upon were:
elasticity – allowing even a small company to shoot for the [...]

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MySQL has a number of different caches. Most of those are dependent on the storage engine that is used. The key buffer for example caches the indexes for MyISAM tables while the caching of data is left to the OS. InnoDB has the buffer pool for both data and indexes and so on. The query [...]

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When I saw this text in this WSJ article about the Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz email, it really sounded like I was re-living the year 2000 doc com bubble and I was reading www.fuckedcompany.com.
We use MySQL extnsivly and for very high availability applications so naturally there was a lot of discussion about the future of MySQL.  [...]

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On April 1st Google hosted a Efficient Data Center Summit .    The videos below are of the Google container based data centers, outlining the design of cooling systems, the containers themselves hosing hundreds of thousands of servers.  It shows their water cooling systems, and video shots of inside of the containers as well as what [...]

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We’ve been investigating the possibilities of using cloud computing for our clients. Especially Amazon EC2 has the potential to be be really effective in offering flexible, pay-as-you-go computing. From my own perspective I have been looking at how to use cloud computing in combination with MySQL and I must say that I’m a bit sceptical [...]

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Andy posted some very good links recently to video’s on how to optimize your web site. Although I spend more time optimizing the database you always have to go where the actual performance is lost. For MySQL the place to check for performance issues is the slow query log which I have mentioned in earlier [...]

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It’s a bit of a long title for a blog post but the point I want to make is that not every query optimization is aimed at making the query faster. As a case in point we have a client that has a web shop and their network traffic between the web servers and the [...]

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Looking back it seems like most posts on this blog are helpful tips and not reports of problems we encountered. Not that we don’t have any problems but we mostly report our solutions instead of the actual problems. Of course now and again a problem comes along that doesn’t have a solution ready to copy-paste [...]

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