Simon J Mudd's Blog

Originally submitted at O’Reilly

Server bottlenecks and failures are a fact of life in any database deployment, but they don’t have to bring everything to a halt. MySQL provides several features that can protect you from outages, whether you’re running directly on the hardware, on virtual machines, or in the cloud. This…

MySQL High Availability

Good coverage of MySQL and replication

Pros: Easy to understand, Accurate, Well-written, Concise, Helpful examples

Best Uses: Intermediate, Expert

Describe Yourself: Sys Admin, Database Administrator

I work in quite a large site and found the book full of useful tips of things to do, and ways to do them in order to achieve the title’s goal of MySQL High Availability.

To be honest the book should really be called “MySQL and replication in large environments” but that does not sound so exciting.

There’s less information on performance tuning and more on working with a large replicated setup. That’s fine: it fits my needs and will certainly fit others too.

It’s also interesting to note how the authors solve many problems by writing wrapper routines around MySQL and the required replication procedures. That’s done in python which is fine but most of the routines I have written with shell scripts or perl. Again if you are looking at the technique the implementation language does not really matter. Oracle should really take note and come up with some standard routines to make more of these tasks doable the same way by everyone. That makes all DBA or sysadmins lives’ easier.

So the book was full of good tips and procedures and is certainly worth the read.

(legalese)