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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Here is the question that was posted on OTN Forum Grid Control Extensibility (not the topic of the forum!) yesterday:

I recently moved south to Bangalore and I am working for a large software integrator. My project team is working on a JEE application project that uses test driven development methodologies. We are planning to use a host of new breed technologies such as Enterprise 2.0, Ajax, Drools, JDO, Hibernate,and mashups. Are you able to point me to online and offline resources/trainings that can help our team get up to speed with these latest technologies.

All the help that group members can provide in this regard is much appreciated.

My first reaction was — how stupid one should be to post such absolutely irrelevant question in that forum? I do see from time to time some questions that are about Grid Control but not about Extensibility and, assuming I have a minute, I might suggest to ask it in the neighboring forum instead. However, this time it seemed absurd to choose this place.

I was even more surprised that someone actually tried to provide a sensible response, I was thinking to blog about it to re-iterate the point that Tom Kyte expressed recently but I couldn’t find the thread anymore. I thought it was moved by a wise admin to a more appropriate place. I did a quick search on OTN forums and found it in… well, many other OTN forums. So it seems that it was simply deleted from Extensibility forum.

Google showed that OTN forums are not the only one appearance of this request. Is this an absolute stupidity or an example of plain scam?

Well, I just needed that rant.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I was at the Hotsos Symposium 2008 this year. You might not know that I also had a chance to take few days off and spend 1+ week vacation in Texas after the symposium — enjoyed the sun and warm weather. My family liked that even more than I did.

Unfortunately, when I was back home last weekend, I discovered pretty unpleasant view from my windows (that’s not basement!):

The view is much better now — I can see some bits of blue sky above a snow bank. So it’s end of March and these days are sunny but freeing — feels like -20 degrees Celsius (below 0 Fahrenheit). My back still hurts from excessive snow shoveling last weekend (so that I can see blue sky from my windows). And… sorry nothing about Oracle — I’m too busy shoveling the snow away from my house so that when it melts next year — I won’t have flooding problem.

I know warmer places do exist! Maybe I should find one?

I would not wish this task on my worst enemy. My friend, good luck and best wishes but I’m afraid I just can’t help you, because that much suffering is way too much for me.

Tonight I am catching up on older e-mails — here’s another question that came to me about 2 weeks ago from a user group member that I never had time to research and answer. I have directed the original author to this post so questions you pose in the comments can be answered.

Do you know anything about indexed file systems? I’m looking for a ‘nearline’ storage solution to help with data archiving.

We have a system which at it’s peak will be accepting 15 million short records / day. In order to keep the Web front end moving nicely, we want to drop data after about 3 weeks and shift it into a higher latency, higher capacity storage system. Indexed file systems seemed like a perfect solution for this. Ideally it would have a good front end to allow execution of arbitrary queries in some language (SQL would be nice).

The only thing I’ve been able to locate is an MS product called “Microsoft Index Server” and another product from a company called CopperEye. The MS product seems nice because it has an SQL front end, apparently. A reliable, easy to set up open source package would be ideal, though.

Do you know anything about these tools, or could you put me in touch with anyone who does?

Hi all,

I was asked this question in an e-mail — feel free to ask your questions in the comments, as I will point the original author to this post to answer those questions. There is not a lot of data here, so instead of me asking questions in an e-mail I figured I would open it up to the (MySQL) world. Without further ado, here’s the question:

Basically when we open more than one connection- we’re opening 5, and we do processing in mysql (innodb tables) the server cpu and memory max out and the processing grinds to a halt. One connection at a time is able to run well- even with lots of data. But once we try to process data under 5 concurrent connections, mysql gets bogged down to the point where it’s barely usable.

I’ve researched this and found a number of opinions, including whether this is just poor performance due to where the we are in the 5.1 life cycle (i.e. energies have gone into fixing big bugs not performance issues). Can you recommend any quick fix- or a reference to someone who might have more info on this. I know mysql handles thousands of concurrent connections in the web world. The difference with us is that we’re doing a lot of number crunching with the data.

Thanks for your help

Well, in the “notes from the front line” part of this post….

I have been a MySQL DBA at The Pythian Group for three months (and 2 days) now. At most companies that is the probationary period, and I am still here, so that is a good sign…..

So, after three months, how do I like it? Glad you asked!

Pros:

1. I am basically a consultant for about 10 different clients — there is always DBA work to do (I do not have to fill in sysadmin stuff like at previous jobs)


2. I am paid a salary and do not need to worry about finding new clients, nor health insurance, etc.


3. Teams are small, so you get to interact with a few coworkers regularly and often (there are about 60 DBAs, which would be unwieldy if we all worked without a team structure).


4. I have already gotten to work with at least 2 technologies (including Cluster) that I have wanted to work with, but had not had the opportunity to in previous workplaces. I have learned a lot and continue to learn.


5. People care about each other, and that starts at the top. Paul Vallee, President, has a philosophy that in any negotiation, both parties should be happy. He cares about the company doing a good job and having happy employees. Having his company do well means a positive cash flow for the most part, but that is not to the exclusion of all other things.


6. Pythian encourages independence, and trusts DBAs to plan and do their work, with the help of the team leads. I have not had a “boss” tell me what to do, but I have had reminders from my team lead of my priorities.

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Like Alex G., I’ve left Ottawa and its wonderful snowy landscape this morning for, let’s say, a sunnier place.

But that’s all we have in common! I know the guy told you he is feeling some stress about his presentation but honestly, I doubt it! He has been preparing it for so long, he knows the subject so well, and he is so smart — just like so many people at Pythian, which is why I like it here so much. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t like to be at the Hotsos Symposium this year and have to choose between Alex and Cary Millsap.

So Alex, while you’ll be off socializing (and probably drinking more beers than you should), I will be working very hard, as always, this time with a couple of Oracle product managers.

The good news is everything went perfectly in Ottawa, Chicago, and here in San Francisco. I did not lose anything, and everything has just been on-time. The not-so-good — my hotel in Belmont seems about 800 miles away from Oracle Headquarters in Redwood City. I snapped this photo as I flew by on the highway:

When I arrived there, I had a couple of emails in my inbox; I should be able to meet the people I want to (except for Chuck and Larry, who are obviously too busy).

What I’ll be doing in the next five days is kind of a secret. Unfortunately, that’s all I’m allowed to tell you, except maybe that I know many people who would love to be in my shoes this week.