Database Performance is a primary concern for Database Administrators today. How can one make sense of all the data that we collect to analyze the performance of the database? I want to highlight some frameworks to help you get started watching the right signals for Database Performance! Overview of Database Performance Frameworks If you are…

Database performance is critical to your role as a database administrator. This shouldn’t be a surprise. If the database is slow, the application is slow. If the application is slow, users leave. Today, I talk about the database telemetry you need to collect to give you insight into how your database is performing. What is…

Database performance is one of the primary responsibilities of database administrators. Unfortunately, many are flying blind and have no idea how the database is really performing. It’s time to talk about another tool in the Data Guardian Toolbox. That tool is Percona’s Performance Monitoring and Management, or PMM. The importance of visibility Often, solutions to…

This has been a crazy year and a half. And for many people it has not been a good one. There’s been a lot of shakeup in companies. If you have lost your job, or are worried about job security, you might be trying to figure out what to do. Today I want to tell…

Infrastructure as Code is defining your infrastructure in terms of configuration files and scripts. More and more, Database Administrators need to learn the principles and tools of infrastructure as code. Today I’m highlighting Terraform, and why it belongs in the Data Guardian toolbox! What is Terraform? Before I get into how Terraform fits in your…

As a database administrator, you may be used to manually installing and managing your database infrastructure. Perhaps you have heard of a concept called Infrastructure as Code. Perhaps your organization demands it. Today I talk about why Database Administrators and Data Guardians need to be familiar with Infrastructure as Code! What is infrastructure as code?…

Efficient communication in today’s remote or hybrid workforce needs to be asynchronous. That means you will need to get good at written communication! In an earlier video, I provided some tips on efficient communication. Today, let’s look at the three basic types of written communication: chat, email and formal reports. And what you need to…

Have you ever made a mistake on a production system? Maybe you spent hours restoring the wrong backup. Or maybe you dropped the wrong table. What were you feeling when you realized you had to tell your boss? Fear? Anxiety? Shame? If those are your expectations, your company is doing incidents wrong. Today, I want…

There is a rising interest in running stateful workloads on Kubernetes. You may not be ready to run your database there. But if your organization is exploring Kubernetes for the rest of its infrastructure, now is a good time to start getting familiar. Today I’ll show you how to get started running MySQL on Kubernetes!…

How much do you know about the technology that powers your database? I’m not talking about the database itself, though that is important. I’m talking about the bits and bytes that allow the database to run. Operating Systems like Linux are usually trusted, and many even see virtualization as boring technology. But now there’s a…

Database configuration is one of those things that you can easily automate with Ansible. I discussed this in my presentation at PerconaLive 2021 on Practical Database Automation. Another good question that came out of that session was what to do with complicated config files. Today I will provide an overview of MySQL database configuration using…

A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on Practical Database Administration with Ansible at PerconaLive ONLINE 2021. I had some pretty good questions come out of that session. One of my favorites was “Why use Ansible over custom scripts?” So today I answer that question by providing 3 reasons to use Ansible over custom…

Two weeks ago, the PerconaLive open source database conference was held online for the second time since COVID shut everything down. You can learn more about my impression as a presenter in another post. This event wasn’t the only industry event that has been disrupted by COVID. This post is some of my thoughts on…

The two-day PerconaLive 2021 was last week. PerconaLive is one of the must-attend open source database conferences of the year. And the folks at Percona that run the event have done a great job organizing the remote event. Normally I would post a video and the text so you would have a choice of how…

User management is one of the key tasks around securing your database. It provides the rules for who can connect, and what they can do after they connect. Keeping track of who can do what can become tedious, but is necessary for Data Security. Today I talk about the MySQL 8.0 feature of user roles…

There can be no doubt that we live in the age of information. From business data, to professional sports statistics, to self-driving vehicles, the amount of information we generate is astounding. All that information at our fingertips, but it has to be stored somewhere. And that somewhere is usually the database, because all information is…

Have you investigated a query that is performing poorly? If so, you likely are familiar with the concept of EXPLAINing the query to see how the database is choosing to obtain the results. EXPLAIN can help you to see whether the query does a full table scan, or a slightly more optimal index scan. But…

In today’s age, users demand instant response times for any application they use. You may have the best product on the market, but if you can’t load the app within milliseconds to any user around the world, you will never be a unicorn! After years of investigating this, it turns out that performance problems are…

I’ve been talking a lot about Data Guardians, and how I believe they are the future of Database Administration. Part of the Guardian’s role is to protect the data, and usually that means maintaining guardrails. The Distributed DBA is one that works remotely along with most, if not all, of their team. So just like…

I’ve previously mentioned that Data Guardians have three key technical areas to spend their time: Data Availability, Data Performance and Data Security. I’ve also stated that we spend our effort between reactive unplanned work and proactive planned work. Today, we will focus the lens on how these concepts apply to Data Availability. Defining Data Availability…

There are two truths that collide in this post: Schema changes are a fact of life. Many schema changes are blocking in MySQL, which reduces data availability. Since Data Availability is a key role for today’s Data Guardian, what can we do about it? Keep reading to find out! Why schema changes are necessary Whether…

I’ve previously mentioned that a Data Guardian will spend their time in three key technical areas when caring for the data environment: Availability, Performance, and Security. But not all work is the same. Today I will talk about planned and unplanned work, or proactive versus reactive work. Reactive versus Proactive work Regardless of what task…

It’s time to introduce another tool in the Data Guardian Toolbox. Lightweight containers such as can be provided by Docker are all the rage these days. But unless your production database runs on containers, you risk having a big discrepancy when testing certain tasks. In this case it’s best to turn to an old favorite:…

I’ve mentioned several times this concept of being a Data Guardian. I want to dive a bit deeper into why I think Data Guardians are replacing the Database Administrator. What is a Data Guardian You may have had bad experiences interacting with your Database Administrator. All you wanted to do was adjust the schema to…

If you’re like me, you hate meetings! Even the word can make my skin crawl. If I’m honest with myself though, I know there are good reasons to have a meeting. Today, I expand on the idea that in a Remote First organization, meetings can be reduced but not eliminated. Can meetings be removed completely?…

I believe data is the single most important commodity of your company. That means choosing the right way to store it is extremely important. Where are companies choosing to store their data? According to db-engines ranking, 9 of the top 15 popular databases are open source. Today, I explore why that might be the case.…

I’ve been talking a lot about automation and its place in the database industry. Today, I want to show one example of automation that comes with the complexity of horizontal scaling. We’ll see how to use Ansible to manage database users. Database user management overview Look, it’s a good idea to have a repeatable process…

You started out as a proof of concept that exploded and now have a product that is used by millions. Let’s talk about scaling your data due to this explosion. What is horizontal scaling? You started out with a few users, and that small instance on your cloud vendor was more than enough to ensure…

I continue the discussion on automation with a practical tool that every Data Guardian should learn. Let’s discuss why Ansible is such an important tool in the Data Guardian’s toolbox. What is Ansible? So what is Ansible, and why is it so important? Ansible is an orchestration tool that allows an operator to execute tasks…

When database administrators think of automation, there might be a lot of fear for the future. There’s a big elephant in the room when this fear grips us: Database-As-a-Service. Let’s go over what Database-As-a-Service is and what it means for the Data Guardian. What is a DBaaS? Database-as-a-Service, or DBaaS, is a widely popular product…