Disaster

Spoiler – Owning your data isn’t good enough

While this is a catchy title, if you use Software as a Service (SaaS), or an online cloud provider, do you actually own and have total control of your business data and its infrastructure?

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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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Checked your MySQL recovery process recently?

I sound like a broken record with every client when I talk to about the resilience of their production environments. It’s very simple in theory, however in practice many organizations fail.

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Calculating your database size

I generally use the following MySQL INFORMATION_SCHEMA (I_S) query to Calculate Your MySQL Database Size . This query and most others that access the MySQL INFORMATION_SCHEMA can be very slow to execute because they are not real tables and are not governed by physical data, memory buffers and indexes for example but rather internal MySQL data structures.

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Never let your binlog directory fill up

Recently with a client while running a number of disaster recovery tests I came across a nasty situation which was not part of the original plan and provided a far worse disaster situation then expected.

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