#DBHangOps!

Talk shop and learn about MySQL and occasionally some other stores!

Topics and RecordingsLearn From Previous Discussions!

How to JoinSome simple setup help!

Follow Us On

Twitter

#DBHangOps 09/17/15 -- Growing Your Team and more!

Hello everybody!

Join in #DBHangOps this Thursday, September, 17, 2015 at 11:00am pacific (18:00 GMT), to participate in the discussion about:

  • Growing your team
    • what’s your hiring criteria?
    • suggested skills for members of your team
    • onboarding for success
    • advice for people who want to be DBAs
  • New technologies. What have you used?
    • Containers
    • Configuration Management
    • Data stores

You can check out the event page at https://plus.google.com/events/cc3lo9jgubj9jv1431bqk6987cg on Thursday to participate.

As always, you can still watch the #DBHangOps twitter search, the @DBHangOps twitter feed, or this blog post to get a link for the google hangout on Thursday!

See all of you on Thursday!

You can catch a livestream at:

Show Notes

Growing your team

What's your hiring criteria?

  • For seasoned DBAs
    • Really want someone who understands production systems and has operational sensibilities
    • Systems and operations focus
    • Support engineering teams in developing new automation
    • Developing your own automation and setting up configuration management
    • Someone who has (or can develop) distributed systems expertise and managing systes of scale
    • Hold perspective on a high-level architecture
  • Having the "standard stuff"
    • Make sure backups are good and working
    • managing and reviewing schemas

Onboarding for success

  • Want your new DBAs to get experienced with the application stack quickly
  • it's important to hold a good relationship with the engineers that write client applications for the database infrastructure
  • Want your whole stack to be more reliable and remove inefficiencies
  • Identifying areas for automation with a fresh perspective
  • New hire checklist!
    • Put together a living document that all new hires should follow to get acquainted with your environment
  • Potentially find a junior member of the organization that you can grow into the role

What advice would you give to a new DBA

  • Read!
    • there's been a lot of exciting blogs written up in the past few months about scaling mysql and caveats to be aware of
    • Read the MySQL documentation, but also be up to date
  • Avoid confining yourself to a single topic/discipline
    • If you don't know about something, dig into it and go deeper
  • Learn the common toolkits and their uses (e.g. percona toolkit, MySQL utilities, common_schema)
  • If it's broken fix it. Don't accept things where they are.
  • Find out where the backups are. Test them if they're not tested.
  • Write documentation about the whole environment from your perspective and grow it
  • Reach out to other people outside your team.
    • Don't be shy to talk to the sys admins, network operations team, sales team, etc!
    • Make friends outside your team!

New Hot Tech?

Links of supreme interest