Archive
Posts in Databases
Getting MySQL running on a CentOS Linux server
I started playing with MySQL back in the 4.X days, but never invested a lot of my time since my day job required me to support Oracle databases. I'm trying to branch out more now, and recently picked up a copy of MySQL, MySQL High Availability and PHP And MySQL. There are a slew of things I would like to web-enable, so I'm hoping to learn everything I can about PHP and MySQL in the next few months. To allow me to start experimenting with PHP and MySQL, I needed to create a test environment…
$ read more →The state of OpenSolaris
Matty and I haven't really spoken much about the current state of the OpenSolaris project. Oracle has been pretty tight with releasing any type of information about their plans / directions in which they will be taking Solaris / OpenSolaris. Its caused a lot fusteration. The OpenSolaris Governing Board threw down the gauntlet and has threatened to dissolve pending some direct interaction / involvement from Oracle…
$ read more →Awesome MySQL performance blog
I came across Neelakanth Nadgir's blog while doing some research, and his performance analysis tools (cmdtruss and inniostat) are pretty sweet. If you are looking to learn more about MySQL performance, you should take a look at High Performance MySQL and the Sun engineering blogs. There is some awesome stuff out there!
$ read more →Oracle needs to fix their certification requirements
I have been spending a good bit of my spare time studying for the Oracle RAC certification, and am hoping to get certified by the end of summer. Once thing that annoys me is the fact that you have to attend a vendor training class in order to get certified. This is kinda silly, and I have yet to find a test that I couldn't pass by studying the product on my own (I have 14 certifications, all of which I got by studying vendor documentation). While I can understand that Oracle wants to make money off the certification process, they should be a bit more flexible and allow people to acquire certifications through self-study (I think you learn more when you study material on your own)…
$ read more →Best I/O scheduler to use with virtualized Linux hosts
While reading through the Redhat Oracle 10G best practices document, I came across this gem: "In virtualized environments, it is often detrimental to schedule I/O at both the host and guest layers. If multiple guests access storage on a file system or block devices managed by the host operating system, the host may be able to schedule I/O more efficiently because it alone is aware of requests from all guests and knows the physical layout of storage, which may not map linearly to the guests' virtual storage. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 guests can use the noop I/O scheduler to allow the host to optimize I/O requests." This makes complete sense, and I am going to have to test out the noop I/O scheduler in my lab this weekend. I'm curious how many folks run the default I/O scheduler in their Xen or KVM guests, and are actually hindering I/O performance by doing so.
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