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#DBHangOps 10/15/15 -- Being a newbie DBA, War stories, and more!

Hello everybody!

Join in #DBHangOps this Thursday, October, 15, 2015 at 11:00am pacific (18:00 GMT), to participate in the discussion about:

  • What advice and resources would you give a newbie DBA
  • What's on your monitoring dashboard?
  • War stories

You can check out the event page at https://plus.google.com/events/cm0vnu6enkekcf4e163d09tsm6o 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

New DBA Advice and Resources

  • Find some sort of training training course to go to for at least a day!
    • Great opportunity to ask a lot of questions and get shared experiences with other students/attendees
    • Oracle prepares and offers various training curriculums
    • Performance and Tuning training
  • Read the High Performance MySQL book!
  • A few high level approaches:
    • supply reading for the person
    • put them into a staging environment to start to learn
    • throw them into production with easier tasks and get started
    • E.g. moving some replication around for the first time
  • Start messing around with MySQL Sandbox
  • Find a nearby MySQL Meetup!
  • A good way to learn things is to answer question on MySQL discussion forums
    • Also StackOverflow
    • #mysql on freenode
    • This is also a good medium to learn to be specific about things at certain times
    • E.g. 5 years ago, Full text indexes only worked in MyISAM. People may be correcting posts that say that these days... :)
  • A good order to learn things
    • Understanding backups
    • If the data isn't there...you won't have a job
    • Understand the reasons for backups and why
    • Figure out how the data is backed up and if it's backed up properly
    • Understand how to restore them
    • Backups are important because hardware fails and people and applications make "mistakes"
      • The wrong records may be changed in yoru dataset and you'll need the old version of that data
    • Replication
    • Understand how to bootstrap a read replica
    • Understand how to move replication
    • Performance and Tuning
    • Understanding how queries work and how data is fetched
    • Understanding how JOINS and subqueries work
    • Getting familiar with the queries working in your schema (use pt-query-digest, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, etc.)
  • How important is normalization?
    • Having a good foundational knowledge of this informs decisions on reducing data size and making performant access to data
    • Understanding where referential integrity needs to be managed
    • A DBA should be familiar with 1NF, 2NF, and 3NF. Beyond that it starts to get academic and not as performant.
  • Open planet.mysql.com and check out some of the blog posts there
    • This might be a little noisy, but always worth a look
  • MySQL 101 track at Percona Live was started last year
    • Very good set of sessions for beginners to participate in

War Stories

  • Accidentally dropped a column instead of an Index....woops!
  • Accidentally changed the Linux user ID of the MySQL data directory while mysql was running....woops!
  • Trying to hot swap an active master in a Master<->Master setup
    • Added another master to make a circular replication ring
    • Pulled out the old server and wrapped up for the night
    • Next morning it appeared that a server_id from a server not in the replication topology was looping between the 2 active masters
    • These statements replicated for a few hours over and over
    • The statement was incrementing in-game currency for a player infinitely... :)
  • A field was an unsigned int and some code kept decrementing until the data went from 0 to a max int
    • Suffice to say...the leaderboard this field populated looked very weird the next day
  • Cloned a read replica with the same server_id

Links of supreme interest!