Planet OCLUG

Hello there, it’s me again, with another blog about a DBA situation that a typical Linux Administrator may find themselves in. In this blog, i’m going to review a recent MySQL upgrade I have done on one of the systems I am involved in administering. This is a real world example of an upgrade project, [...]

Hello, My name is James McOrmond. I am a MySQL DBA (and part time SysAdmin) at the ‘The Pythian Group’ headquarters here in Ottawa. In my previous employment I was the primary System Administrator for a local Linux OS software company (for over 8 years). Server backups were of course something I was doing as [...]

I found I never published this post as it was sitting in my drafts few months now — it was written in 13th February, 2010. I’m publishing it without any changes. I learn therefore I am! I’ve just wrote few bits about learning a new technology and after skimming through my Google Reader, I noticed [...]

A MySQL user group member saw that I use Poderosa as my ssh-on-Windows tool, and asked why I did not use PuTTY. My response was that I like having tabbed windows and hate having to keep opening another PuTTY program every time I want to open another connection. With Poderosa I can open a new [...]

I am attending the Professional IT Community Conference – it is put on by the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), and is a 2-day community conference. There are technical and “soft” topics — the audience is system administrators. While technical topics such as Essential IPv6 for Linux Administrators are not essential for my job, many of the “soft” topics are directly applicable and relevant to DBAs too. (I am speaking on How to Stop Hating MySQL tomorrow.)

So I am in Seeking Senior and Beyond: The Tech Skills That Get You Promoted. The first part talks about the definition of what it means to be senior, and it completely relates to DBA work:
works and plays well with other
understands “ability”
leads by example
lives to share knowledge
understands “Service”
thoughtful of the consequences of their actions
understands projects
cool under pressure

Good Qualities:
confident
empathetic
humane
personal
forthright
respectful
thorough

Bad Qualities:
disrespective
insensitive
incompetent
[my own addition - no follow through, lack of attention to detail]

The Dice/Monster Factor – what do job sites see as important for a senior position?

They back up the SAGE 5-year experience requirement
Ability to code in newer languages (Ruby/Python) is more prevalent (perhaps cloud-induced?)

The cloud allows sysadmin tasks to be done by anyone…..so developers can do sysadmin work, and you end up seeing schizophrenic job descriptions such as

About the 5-year requirement:
- Senior after 5 years? What happens after 10 years?
- Most electricians, by comparison, haven’t even completed an *apprenticeship* in 5 years.

Senior Administrators Code
- not just 20-line shell scripts
- coding skills are part of a sysadmin skill
- ability to code competently *is* a factor that separates juniors from seniors
- hiring managers expect senior admins to be competent coders.

If you are not a coder
- pick a language, any language
- do not listen to fans, find one that fits how you think, they all work…..
- …that being said, some languages are more practical than others (ie, .NET probably is not the best language to learn if you are a Unix sysadmin).

Popular admin languages:
- Perl: classic admin scripting language. Learn at least the basics, because you will see it in any environment that has been around for more than 5 years.

- Ruby: object-oriented language for people who mostly like Perl (except for its OO implementation)

- Python: object-oriented language for people who mostly hate Perl, objects or no objects. For example, you don’t have to create a String object to send an output.

But what if you do not have time to learn how to program?

- senior admins are better at managing their time than junior admins, so perhaps managing time
- time management means you’ll have more time to do things, it doesn’t mean all work work work.
- Read Time Management for System Administrators – there is Google Video of a presentation by the author, Tom Limoncelli.

Consider “The Cloud”
- starting to use developer APIs to perform sysadmin tasks, so learning programming is good.
- still growing, could supplant large portions of datacenter real estate
- a coder with sysadmin knowledge: Good
- a sysadmin with coding knowledge: Good
- a coder without sysadmin knowledge: OK
- a sysadmin with no coding interest/experience: Tough place to be in

Senior Admins Have Problems Too
Many don’t document or share knowledge
Maany don’t do a good job keeping up with their craft
Cannot always be highlighted as an example of how to deal with clients
Often reinvent the wheel – also usually there is no repository
Often don’t progress beyond the “senior admin” role

….on the other hand…..
cynicism can be good…..

Advice:
learn from the good traits
observe how others respond to their bad traits
think about how you might improve upon that
strive to work and play well with others, even if you don’t have a mentor for good/bad examples.

Now he’s going into talking about Patterns in System Administration….

My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009.

The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know.

For those of you unfamiliar with OmniTI, Theo is the CEO of this rather remarkable company specializing in Internet-scale architecture consulting. They generalize on Internet-scale architecture, not on one specific dimension the way Pythian specializes on the database tier. This allows them to see Internet-scale workloads from a unique systemic, multidisciplinary point of view; from the user experience all the way up the stack, through the load balancer (or not), the front-end cache, the application server, the database server, the operating system, the storage, and so on. This approach lets them build Internet architectures and solve scalability problems in a unique and powerful, wholistic way.

Pythian first collaborated with OmniTI in 2001, and they deserve all of their success and profile that they’ve built since then. Trivia: both Pythian and OmniTI were founded in September 1997 and both companies continue to be majority-owned and controlled by founders (in Pythian’s case, yours truly).

Here’s the slide deck. Let me know your thoughts.

In about 15 minutes, Giuseppe Maxia will begin a webinar in which the main focus is a presentation on “How to have a good presentation”. Talk about meta!

Giuseppe posted how to join the free webinar.

The slides can be found at http://datacharmer.org/downloads/2009_03_Presentation.pdf.

Welcome to the 128^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s begin with some PostgreSQL blogs. Jignesh Shah shares his recipe for making a PostgreSQL 8.3 appliance based on OpenSolaris using VirtualBox. While we’re on appliances, Dave Page shows off PostgreSQL management on the iPhone with an application he himself wrote. Stealth DBA for the bus-rise home.

On Database Soup, Josh Berkus has been finding useless indexes. He begins, “I’d say, in general, that you can’t have really well-chosen indexes without the help of a performance expert. However, anyone can improve their use of indexes in PostgreSQL fairly easily using a few system tools … and a little improvement is all that a lot of users need.” And it’s what Josh offers.

Sometimes a DBA is asked to make something real purty-like, contrary to his or her nature though that may be. On the Postgres OnLine Journal, Leo Hsu and Regina Obe offer some help with the first of a series on Fusion charts and PostgreSQL. (”Fusion Charts . . . is a flash-based charting product that makes beautiful flash charts.”)

And now—hey what’s MySQL maven Baron Schwartz doing with a Postgres post on xaprb? He’s asking, what are your favorite PostgreSQL performance resources?

Maybe he’s considering crossing the floor out of weariness with all the contention in the MySQL world? Can’t say I blame him. Lately, the conversation in the MySQL ’sphere has been dominated by non-technical talk of the pluses and minuses of 5.1, of forking, community vs. enterprise, and so on. This week was no exception.

The week began with Jay Pipes’s advice to MySQL: “Drop the current roadmap . . . Forget Windows for now . . . Clean up the abysmal messiness of the code base . . .” It’s strong stuff and worth a read.

Lukas Kahwe Smith followed with his advice to the database division at Sun, purveyor or patron now of MySQL, Drizzle, and PostgreSQL.

Jeremy Zawodny surveyed this new MySQL landscape, full as it now is of patches, forks, and Drizzle, and liked what he saw.

Speaking of which, the MySQL Performance Blog announced the Percona XtraDB Storage Engine: a drop-in replacement for standard InnoDB.

Ronald Bradford got some unexpected results while looking into the size of memory tables. Can you help Ronald out?

On High Availability MySQL, Mark Callaghan showed us how to make MySQL faster in one hour. Nice stuff. And real purty charts, too.

Let’s see what happened in SQL Server now. Kalen Delany opined that there is no such thing as a SQL Server, and she’s not the only one with an opinion on this (one would think) straight-forward matter.

Lichi Shea asserted that there is a limit to set-based solutions: “After all, some procedural solutions are not so bad!  . . .  Now, it’s time for me to dodge the set-based solution crowd.”

Lots of thoughtful comment on that one, and a blog response from Ward Pond, who says that Linchi Shea makes an interesting point about hints, vis-a-vis the set-based and procedural paradigms.

The Data Management Journal looked into extracting numbers with SQL Server: “We all have perfectly normalized tables, with perfectly scrubbed data, right? I wish! Sometimes we are stuck with dirty data in legacy applications. What’s worse is that we are sometimes expected to do interesting things with dirty data. In this blog, I will show you how to extract a number from a varchar column that contains letters and numbers.”

TJay Belt published his reflection, Cloud Computing and me. Like many DBAs, TJay has some thoughts on how the advent of “The Cloud” is going to affect databases and database administration.

Moving into things Oracle, Chen Shapira was thinking about a musical analogy for the DBA. Their not “rockstar programmers” or “jazz programmers”, says Chen. But I won’t give away her conclusion—click on.

Chet Justice, the Oracle Nerd, was pursuing ontology too in the second part of his Application Developers vs. Database Developers. (I wonder if it’s generally true that apps developers have such terrible manners.)

Gary Myers responded, “Oraclenerd has opened that can of worms about OO, ORMs and Databases,” in his item, The Certainty Bottleneck (and ORMs).

On An Expert’s Guide to Database Solutions, James Koopman suggested, maybe it’s time to extend the DBA’s realm of influence, using tools like Spotlight on Oracle.

Or perhaps with other tools, such as TOra? Here on the Pythian Blog, Brad Hudson posted his howto, Installing TOra with Oracle support on Ubuntu 8.04LTS (Hardy Heron).

One last important bit of news from this week—Thomas LaRock, AKA SQLBatman, is America’s Most Exciting DBA.

Until next time, Happy Holidays to all our readers!

I’m pleased to announce that there will be the formal launch of Pythian Europe at the premises of the Canadian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday the 6th of August from 17:00 to 18:30. This historic event will be announced by Mrs. Sameena Qureshi, Trade Counsellor, Embassy of Canada; and Paul Vallée, President and Founder, The Pythian Group. Present will be various members from the press (IT and Business), as well as representatives from Oracle and Sun Microsystems, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Prague, and many more. We will prepare some unusual and very tasty snacks and refreshments.

We would love for readers of this blog to join us, so please consider this your special, personal invitation from me. Please come if you’re in Prague on Wednesday. If you plan to attend, please contact Dan at elbl@pythian.com.

I am traveling to Europe next week to brief major prospects in Germany (Daimler, MAN) as well as to attend to administrative matters at Pythian Europe in Prague and would love to meet any readers of this blog during this trip!

I’m especially interested in meeting:

• DBAs, Applications Administrators and Systems Administrators,
• Potential customers (IT Directors, DBA Managers, Supply Managers for IT), and
• Potential partners (IT product of service companies that could partner with Pythian to delight our mutual customers)

Here is my itinerary:

• Sunday, August: Frankfurt,
• Monday, August 4: Stuttgart,
• Tuesday, August 5: Munich, and
• Wednesday, August 6 through Saturday, August 9: Prague, Czech Republic.

Please reach out to me using vallee@pythian.com if you would like to meet!

I try to do a decent job of advocating for caring about good backups and business continuity strategies in my 7 Deadly Habits article.

But this one beats them all:

Just too funny and great not to share. Found via this reddit article, where there is a lively discussion underway.

It recently came up that it would be helpful if we had a cheat sheet to find out the machine names for any given UNIX. I knew these off the top of my head but it would be great if people added more as comments.

HP/HP-UX: /bin/uname -i
IBM/AIX: /bin/uname -m
SGI/IRIX: /sbin/sysinfo -s
Sun/Solaris: /usr/ucb/hostid