Pythian Group

For very personal reasons that don’t belong in this article, I decided a few weeks ago that it’s time for me to move on. The year and a half that I worked for Pythian have been a wonderful experience, and this is article is my tribute to this great company.

The MySQL Team

Being able to work side by side with two MySQL experts like Sheeri Cabral and Augusto Bott has been a great experience. I have learned a lot, not only about MySQL, but also about what a great DBA should be like. Both of them are recognized MySQL Community members and regular speakers at the MySQL Users Conference and other events. Sheeri has been named MySQL Community Member of the Year twice in a row. Both are a guarantee of excellent service.

My Predictions For Pythian

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Yesterday, The Pythian Group issued a press release about my book, Pythian’s partnership with Sun, and our new “MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package”. I am not a marketing guru, but I can tell you what we the package means in terms of new work that the MySQL teams have been doing.

Basically, the MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package combines customized training with a comprehensive audit of systems. The name “Adoption Accelerator” makes it sound like it’s only for new applications that are almost ready to go live. What the program actually does is have us evaluate your systems, and intensively train you in the areas you want and need. The program is designed to suit all your needs, whether it’s teaching you about one topic (say, query optimization) or an entire range of topics, from Architecture to ZFS (special issues with running MySQL on ZFS, that is, but that did not fit a cute “from A-Z” model…).

Whether you have already adopted MySQL or are thinking of converting from Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server or even sqlite, this new package may be what you need.

And now, the full text of the press release, for the curious:

‘MySQL Administrator’s Bible’ Hits the Bookstands: Pythian Launches MySQL Accelerator Adoption Package

The Pythian Group, the leading provider of remote database services, is pleased to announce that the much-anticipated MySQL Administrator’s Bible, written by employee Sheeri K. Cabral, is now available.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hardware

My Dell desktop:

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
cpu MHz         : 2793.022
cache size      : 512 KB

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      2073404 kB
...

Operating System

Download Centos Linux, and install the Linux operating system.

Kernel Version

Download kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm and apply with:

$ rpm -ivh  kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm 

The kernel should look like this:

root@erp RPMs]# uname -a
Linux erp.itskills.com 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Oct 5 15:04:03 CDT 2006 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux

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Previously on Log Buffer: Log Buffer #119.

And now.

Welcome to Log Buffer #120. My name is Warner, and I’m a SQL Server DBA at The Pythian Group. This is my first time on Log Buffer duties ever, so here’s hoping I can give everyone a fair and unbiased look at this week in the database blogging world (and related).

I admit I had no idea of the community or state of the PostgreSQL RDBMS, and so I definitely learned some new stuff this week. First off, over on “The Scale-out Blog” Robert Hodges invites us all to get our shoephone and get smart about the new world of PostgreSQL replication.

Moving over to “ad’s corner”, Andreas Scherbaum gives us a glimpse of the glitz and glam of PGDay opening. Then he entices us with the title, “Party in the evening” just to horrify us by revealing that—you’d better sit down—by the end of the event half of the beer was still untouched. Next time Andreas, who you gonna call?

“Everything is a DNS problem,” is my new voicemail message, and also the title for Kris Buytaert’s blog, where we go deep into uncovering once again the 10 month-old enigma of why did Sun buy MySQL.

Next up, I will speak to you, Mr. (or Ms.) Cross-Platform DBA. You think you know all of Oracle’s exp command-line switches? All of SQL Server’s bcp formats? And all of the things you can do with . . .  whatever you use with DB2? Read the rest of this entry . . .

Updated 16-FEB-09: I moved to Australia in Sep-08. I realized that quite a few people are coming to this page while seeking to resource their DBA needs. Now you know where to call. ;-)

I’m going to present couple sessions at the Australian Oracle User Group Conference in Melbourne next week. It’s the first time I’m presenting Down Under and I’m looking forward to it, although I’m still not sure if I should start from the last slide and proceed backward . . .

Since it’s more than a day of flying only one way, it wouldn’t be smart to go for only two days, so I’m taking the opportunity to spend this week with my Sydney colleagues — Paul Moen and Andrey Goryunov. I should mention that Australia is the first country I ever visited. I fell in love with this country seven years ago when I came from Russia in February. Culture shock and dramatic weather change set the tone for how I feel about Australia for the rest of my life. So hello Sydney — I’m back!

I was supposed to fly Ottawa-Vancouver-Honolulu-Sydney, my flight leaving from Ottawa at 8:00AM on Saturday. I was packing until very late and finished only by 3 AM. No surprise that, although I set my alarm clock to 6:00AM, I forgot to switch it on for the weekend days. The net result: Olga woke my up at 7:30. Anyway, Air Canada was very nice to re-route me through Toronto so that I still could make my connection in Vancouver . . . so $50 for an additional 1.5 hour sleep — not a bad trade at all!

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hello everyone,

I think this will be a great log buffer.

Dave has been sick these past two days and as a result, we do not have a comprehensive log buffer ready the way we or a volunteer usually do. This was bound to happen to log buffer at some point and today it has happened.

So I had two choices – cancel this week’s log buffer, or try to make it great despite this adversity. Never one to accept defeat easily, I’ll go for the second option. At least if this is the lamest log buffer ever it won’t be because I didn’t try something new that had a shot at a good result.

So this week’s log buffer is as follows: If you came here to read interesting content from the database community, you probably spend some time each day learning and reading about things we would all find interesting. We are counting on each and every one of you, our faithful readers, to propose the one article you read in the last week (and preferably was written in the last week but I can’t exactly be choosy at this point can I?), and include a short paragraph as to why this article was interesting to you and why it should interest us. Do this in the comments to this post; the akismet spamfilter will tend to eat comments with URLs so please include the magic word “contribution” somewhere in your comment so I can go dig them out for approval.

Feel free to link to your own blog posts if you are proud of them. It is a carnival of the vanities, after all.

A typical log buffer gets over a thousand reads over the week it is active. I am going to call this experiment a success if there are at least 25 interesting links written by the community posted below! And if there are not, well it was worth a try and much better than saying it was canceled.

And so this will be the first log buffer truly written by the readership – join us to make it a good one!

Thanks

Paul
P.S.

Get well soon, Dave