Amazon Web Services (AWS)

#WDILTW – What can I run from my AWS Aurora database

When you work with AWS Aurora you have limited admin privileges. There are some different grants for MySQL including SELECT INTO S3 and LOAD FROM S3 that replace the loss of functionality to SELECT INTO OUTFILE and mysqldump/mysqlimport using a delimited format.

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#WDILTW – Debugging failed http requests thru the web of redirects

There are reports that your website is down. You pull up the login page without incident. What’s next? Monitoring is critical. How detailed is this? How frequently are you sampling? The resolution to any issue is only as good as the response to a paged alert.

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#WDILTW – AWS RDS Proxy

This week I was evaluating AWS RDS Proxy . If you are familiar with the Relational Database Service (RDS) and use MySQL or Postgres, this is an additional option to consider.

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Enforcing a least privileged security model can be hard

In a greenfield environment you generally have the luxury to right any wrongs of any past tech debt. It can be more difficult to apply this to an existing environment? For example, my setup is configured to just work with the AWS CLI and various litmus tests to validate that.

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Defensive Data Techniques

As a data architect I always ensure that for any database schema change there a fully recoverable execution path. I have generally advised to create a patch/revert process for every change.

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AWS cost saving tips – EBS Volumes

A trivial cost saving tip for checking if you are spending money in your AWS environment on unused resources. This is especially appropriate when using provisioned IOPS EBS volumes. $ ec2-describe-volumes | grep available VOLUME vol-44dff904 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-01T14:11:24+0000 standard VOLUME vol-62dff922 100 us-east-1b available 2014-08-01T14:11:24+0000 io1 1000 VOLUME vol-15dff955 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-01T14:11:24+0000 standard VOLUME vol-80a88ec0 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-01T15:12:54+0000 standard VOLUME vol-ca82a48a 100 us-east-1b available 2014-08-01T16:13:49+0000 standard VOLUME vol-5d79581d 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-01T18:27:01+0000 standard VOLUME vol-baf9dbfa 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-03T18:20:59+0000 standard VOLUME vol-53ffdd13 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-03T18:25:52+0000 standard VOLUME vol-ade7daed 8 snap-d86d0884 us-east-1b available 2014-08-13T20:10:46+0000 standard VOLUME vol-34e2df74 8 snap-065a2e52 us-east-1b available 2014-08-13T20:26:17+0000 standard VOLUME vol-cacef38a 100 snap-280ffb7f us-east-1b available 2014-08-13T21:19:18+0000 standard VOLUME vol-41350a01 8 snap-f23ccba5 us-east-1b available 2014-08-14T16:54:27+0000 standard VOLUME vol-51350a11 100 snap-fc3ccbab us-east-1b available 2014-08-14T16:54:27+0000 standard VOLUME vol-912f10d1 8 snap-96ee24c1 us-east-1b available 2014-08-14T17:15:06+0000 standard VOLUME vol-a82f10e8 100 snap-9dee24ca us-east-1b available 2014-08-14T17:15:06+0000 standard These are available and unused EBS volumes which you should consider deleting.

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Another reason to avoid RDS

My list of reasons for never using or recommending Amazon’s MySQL RDS service grows every time I experience problems with customers. This was an interesting and still unresolved issue. ERROR 126 (HY000): Incorrect key file for table '/rdsdbdata/tmp/#sql_5b7_1.

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Basic scalability principles to avert downtime

In the press in the last two days has been the reported outage of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in just one North Virginia data center. This has affected many large website includes FourSquare , Hootsuite , Reddit and Quora .

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Problems compiling MySQL 5.4

Seem’s the year Sun had for improving MySQL , and with an entire new 5.4 branch the development team could not fix the autoconf and compile dependencies that has been in MySQL for all the years I’ve been compiling MySQL.

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Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Presentation

On Tuesday at the MySQL Camp 2009 in Santa Clara I presented Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This presentation assumed you know nothing about AWS, and have no account.

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