Sorry for the recent loss of the site. Blogger just didn’t play nice with the new hosting provider, no matter what I did. Out with the old and in with the new.

So what is on the agenda after such as long period without posts.

Some ideas for future posts:

1. Hosted Database solutions, the good, the bad and the ugly.
2. Running databases on virtual machines/clouds.
3. DBA toolsets, do custom scripts have a place in the world containing percona-tools
4. DBAs, Is this the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning? or am I running out of clichés
5. SQL is dead long live SQL.
6. Interviews with DBAs. 10 questions answered by the finest DBAs
7. Remote DBA work, is it the promised land?
8. Databases and Machine learning, is the self-tuning database in sight?

I was reviewing what I had written over the last 2 years, and how people had reacted via comments and page views, even what keywords were most popular.

Here is the first draft (pending input from interested readers via adding a comment)

1. More dbt2 benchmark articles.
2. Amazon EC2 LVM snapshots vs EBS snapshots.
3. Backup software for MySQL and specifically on EC2.
4. Benchmarking Amazon EBS using iozone.
5. Installing, testing and benchmarking the non-standard MySQL engines such as OurDelta and XtraDB and plugins.
6. Using EC2 as a test bed for new versions of MySQL and Oracle and other dbs.
7. New: Using Microsoft SQL server on EC2.
8. New: Using Postgresql on EC2.
9. New: Using DB2 on EC2.

New stuff over the next 12 months:

The newest theme for the next 12 months will be revisiting the original idea behind the blog. That theme was the publication of useful methods and recipes for all DBAs and DBA/Developers and people wearing DBA/Developer/SysAdmin/NetworkAdmin or more hats.

A Dojo is a commonly associated with a training place for training in Martial Arts. This Dojo is a training place for Database Administrators (DBAs).

A common method in Martial Arts is a Kata. This is the idea of honing your skills (as a DBA in this case) through training and practice. So there will be articles published under the kata category covering exercises to help people become more polished and skilful with the common tasks and responsibilities of being a DBA.

Have Fun

Paul

Posting has been lighter than normal, as I have had the flu and it is footy finals time in Australia.

However I sat down the other day and thought about which areas I hope to cover over the next couple of months.
Given this is a blog and comments are on, if you want something covered which is not on the list feel free to add a comment with a request.

Topics:

Replication:

1. Determine the IO/sec where the slave starts falling behind.
2. Test mysqlslap running write workload on master and read workload on slave.
3. Test running mysqlslap 3rd machine and connection to master and slave.
4. Test running mysqlslap on replication with auto-increment column so show the effect of increment locking on master and slave.
5. mysqlslap vs MySQL 5.1 row based replication

The end result is a performance report which answers the following questions:

1. how many concurrent users causes the slave to fall behind
2. When does network bandwidth become an issue. (test simple scp to get raw bandwidth)
3. how does reading from the slave affect the slave’s ability to keep up.

MySQL Cluster:

1. mysqlslap vs MySQL 5.1 Cluster
2. running ndb Sizing script against normal database
3. mysqlslap vs MySQL 5.1 Cluster Replication
4. benchmarking and performance.

MySQL Toolkit and related:

1. One article per mysqltoolkit tool.
2. Article on using innotop

Misc:

1. Testing mysql partitioning, and maintenance tasks.
2. How to design your database for your application (using load tables, federated storage)
3. Using tmpdir as /dev/shm to help with temp table issues.
4. Point in Time recovery with MySQL. Using slave (start slave until)
5. Backups using LVM. => Done
6. innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT. Reason: see what the difference is, on a standalone instance and replication.

PostgreSQL:

1. performance
2. clustering options for redundancy

Sharding:

1. Using MySql
2. using OracleXE
3. using PostgreSQL
4. using Hibernate

Have Fun

Paul