I confess — I have not always been an exclusive MySQL user. I have fooled around with other DBMSs. I was young, inexperienced, and I needed the money, I swear!

This comes about because I was doing some electronic de-crufting….From a file last modified on 10:50 am on 2005-06-30:

> more addcatalog.sh
#!/bin/sh

 db2 catalog tcpip node $1 remote $2 server 50000
 db2 terminate
 db2 catalog database sample as $2 at node $1
 db2 terminate

# [db2inst1@midgard db2inst1]$ db2sql92 -a db2inst3/password -d coworkername

And from the same time-frame there’s also:

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Interesting results you can see from some low quality news aggregators Looking at this page you might think that I’m awarded with the Liberty Medal:

I’ve got this link while browsing the search results for RAC Attack. I guess should ask my granddad to pass my best wishes to Mr. George H.W. Bush.

Exceptional Software Explained: Embrace Error, by Robert “r0ml” Lefkowitz of Asurion. One of the contenders for “best open source comedian”, r0ml delivers a humorous look at the past and future of software development models. This keynote was delivered at OSCon 2008 on Tuesday evening.

Play this 20 minute video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/577/play or download the 286 Mb file directly at http://technocation.org/node/577/download.

I found myself, as a fresh member of The Pythian Group, losing precious moments just to change a few standard administrative settings on my new laptop with Microsoft Windows Vista. Having found the answers, I’m sharing them with you so that you can save some time, or spend it more pleasurably out in the summer.

User Account Control (UAC)

Too many prompts and confirmations for admin tasks? Set “Elevate without prompting” for “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode” under Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options. Ref: UAC on Wikipedia.

Windows Vista Features

By default, telnet is not installed with Windows Vista. To (re-)enable it, select the Telnet Client check box in Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> “Turn Windows features on or off”. Then, Windows Features dialog -> Telnet Client. Now you may use telnet from the command prompt as you are used to in XP. Ref: FAQ on windowshelp.microsoft.com

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Seems I have turned into a bit of a news source. dbWatch Software sent me a news release on their dbWatch monitoring platform, which looks like it might be an interesting product for those who work in a heterogeneous database environment. Here’s the release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Rob Shuster, VP US Sales
dbWatch USA
6122B S. Eagle Pass Rd.
Gold Canyon, AZ
85218

Phone: 800-270-9892

http://www.dbwatchusa.com

info@dbwatchusa.com

dbWatch Software Announces US based Sales & Support Oslo, Norway — June 23, 2008 – dbWatch Software has launched a US sales and support organization. The flagship product, dbWatch™ (v8.1), is a heterogeneous database monitoring/reporting tool currently supports Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.

Marek Jablonski, CEO states “As a DBA you are often stuck with multiple platforms (both OS and database systems) and multiple unmanageable tools from database providers. dbWatch™ is a single tool allowing the DBA to monitor all databases and generate professional custom reports.”

Clear Channel Norway IT Director, Jan Erik Rasmussen, reports “dbWatch provides an effective overview of our databases, and allows me to sleep well at night.”

Three dbWatch™ editions are available: Standard ($195), Professional ($1,995 to $9,995), and Enterprise ($14,995). A free 30-day evaluation is available for download.

For information: http://www.dbwatchusa.com or

Contact: info@dbwatchusa.com

Phone: 800-270-9892

It was a timely contact, coinciding with Sheeri’s review of MONyog. It sounds like dbWatch is the kind of tool that would be valuable here at Pythian, where we work with all of the DBMSs it supports. But — I haven’t tried it yet, so I put it to you: have any of you used dbaWatch? If so, what are you opinions?

I just wanted to thank everyone who participated in the survey that Mark Schoonover and I created. My endless thanks goes to Mark who did a lot of work on this.

The results will be coming out in the Summer issue of MySQL Magazine which will be online July the 15th. I am putting together the articles now and it looks like it’s going to be a great one!

In case you haven’t heard, on Monday, MySQL released the next RC of 5.1.25. It is available to the community, so download it now and take it for a spin!

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html.

So, we have all heard that Billy Joel played a concert at Oracle’s OpenWorld in 2007.

What follows is an actual IRC conversation among Don Seiler, Dave Edwards, and myself:

(4:02:46 PM) don: ha @ Billy Joel at OOW
(4:03:38 PM) dave: “We didn’t fire the startup…”
(4:07:53 PM) don: “we didn’t start the backup”?
(4:12:53 PM) dave: “Don’t go changin’ . . . your slave and master”
(4:20:19 PM) ***sheeri shoots Dave
(4:20:49 PM) sheeri: “I don’t want clever replication, we never could have come this far”
(4:24:05 PM) sheeri: “And the server sounds like an aero-plane, and replication chugs along as it must…and the inserts go on, replication corrupts, and I say “Man, now I’m workin’ all night!”

(4:24:29 PM) dave: “I said ‘ls -u’ . . . that’s for access”
[”I said I love you . . . that’s forever”]

(4:24:30 PM) don: UP-TIME GIRL
(4:34:09 PM) dave: “Say it’s not wrong, execution plan!”
(4:43:39 PM) sheeri: Where’s my execution plan, oh man?
[Sing us a song of a piano man]
(4:45:52 PM) sheeri: Go ahead with your schema, leave me alone!

Comment here with your own database-themed parody of a Billy Joel song. Perhaps if we get enough MySQL-themed entries, we can get him to come to the MySQL Conference in April.

That and maybe thousands of dollars………..

Or, How to Be a Command-Line Commando

Does it surprise you to learn that I’m a Linux guy? I’ve been using Linux, to the exclusion more-or-less of everything else, since about 1999. In the past, I’ve done a little programming and some junior system administration. I’m even LPI-certified.

With this background, I’m quite comfortable working in the shell (AKA the command-line), the natural habitat of the sysadmin^[1]. I frequently open a shell to do some quick work, and when I do, I use GNU’s Bash, which is the default on most Linux distributions. (I believe it’s also the default shell in Mac OS X.)

One of Bash’s features is editable command-line history, which makes your current command-line and its entire history available to you as an editable buffer. That offers a great way to streamline your work in the shell.

I suspect, however, that many shell users don’t even know about this better way. And it baffles me that many SAs I have seen in action — including some of Pythian’s own — don’t use this. They almost seem to prefer unnecessary effort — smashing away at their keyboards, repeating themselves, deleting with the Backspace key, scrolling, forwarding their cursor one character at a time, copying and pasting with the mouse, and so on. That’s a lot of elbow grease.

With Bash, or any other shell that uses the GNU readline library, you can use the following Emacs-like key-chords to make your life better. The point of this (as with so many things sysadmins and programmers do) is to save you effort, viz. typing. These aren’t all of them; they’re the ones I use:

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I’ll preface this post with a note that the story itself is not really work- or DBA-related, but the lessons learned certainly are. I consider myself fairly conscientious when it comes to internet security and backing up my most important files (pictures of kids, music, etc), and I am diligent about taking at least a weekly backup of those files so that if (when) something catastrophic happens, I am ready. Once again, as my short life as a DBA has proven, theory and practicality rarely meet.

Monday night, I needed a stress reliever. My family and I recently moved to Ottawa from Wichita and it has been a five-month-long ordeal. I used to be an avid gamer, but with changing jobs, selling the house, moving, family issues, etc., I haven’t had a lot of time to kick back and relax. I decided to visit one of my favorite websites, www.armchairgeneral.com, to see if they had any good reviews of new games to play. One in particular caught my eye, called “Mount and Blade”. Looks like an interesting twist on your standard medieval-based RPG — the combat is in first person. The game is still in beta, but can be downloaded by anyone wanting to play it. So I downloaded it from a link on the game’s website that pointed me to CNet.

Not the wisest decision in my life, as about 10 minutes later my virus scan software (AVG) warned of viruses and Trojan horses. I quarantined everything that it found, but it wasn’t enough — I was officially infected for the first time in four years. I tried for an hour that night to undo the damage, but didn’t have much success. This bug was nasty — it even went so far as to detect that I tried to go back to a previous System Restore Point and it erased them. My colleagues at Pythian took an immediate interest in my dilemma and suggested several helpful tools (like Process Explorer) that I also tried with limited success.

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