A Day Late

The High Performance MySQL book, by Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling, finally arrived from Amazon. There’s very few tech books I can read from cover to cover but this is one of them. I’m three chapters into it and I have a decent list of things I want to try/change with our MySQL installation, at work.

Our installation at work is version 3.23 running on an HP UX system (first on the list is upgrading to 4.0). I wouldn’t call our implementation trivial. The alumni database has several tables with over a million records. I inheritated the implementation when I was hired a little over 8 months ago and I’ve been surprised at how fast everything runs. Esspecially since I know there wasn’t any real optimization work done when it was designed and implemented. Our alumni database is merely a copy of the actual one, which is running on an IBM AS/400 DB2 system. Today I was running a few queries comparing data in our tables with the tables on the DB2 system. Most of the queries executed on our system with a few on the DB2 system. Just out of curiosity I decided to reverse the queries, executing them against the DB2 system. The same page (set of queries) loaded about 3 to 4 times faster using our MySQL system. I’m sure the bandwidth limitations between our web server and the DB2 system had something to do with it, but I think it’s still safe to say MySQL outperformed.

Anyway, with all that said there’s a lot of things I’d like to do to increase our performance and reliability. Replication, load balancing, backup and a few other things. The type of things this book was written for. We have another HP UX machine sitting in the datacenter, unused. Perfect for experimenting. If you’re someone like me, who uses MySQL and knows enough to make things work but wants to take it to the next level, this is the book to read. Also, Jeremy has written some good articles on MySQL in Linux Magazine recently that are worth reading.

Each year I can attend one conference. Last year I attended the Macromedia MAX conference in Salt Lake City (its close proximity had a lot to do with that decision). I need to decide which conference I’m going to attend this year, but I’m having some trouble deciding. I thought about the MySQL Users Conference, but since it ends tomorrow it’s not an option. I’m considering attending the Macromedia MAX Conference again (in New Orleans this year) and it seems to be the logical choice.

My development team spends about 90% of their time developing on ColdFusion using Macromedia products. Some might ask why that’s the case. It has a lot to do with the environment I work in. My development team is made up entirely of students, which usually means they don’t have advanced technical/programming skills when they start (that’s why they’re in school). Also, they’re not long term employees. Generally if they stick around more than 2 years I consider myself lucky. The combination of high turnaround and unskilled applicants means we need to use something that’s easy and quick to learn. Coldfusion fits that need fairly well. More so than Java, PHP and other development languages (that I might prefer more).

Anyway, back to the original subject, what conference should I attend? Like I said, the Macromedia conference is the only one I’m considering at the moment but I’m open to any other recommendations.

I got a flu shot today. I think this is the 6th straight year I’ve got one but this is the first time I’ve ended up with a stiff arm. It might have something to do with the fact that I spent the rest of the day sitting at a computer, keeping my arm relatively motionless. In the past I’ve always made an effort to move my arm around, today I just forgot about it. Is it worth it to get a flu shot? I dunno, the way I see it my insurance company pays for it, I can get it on campus so it takes all of 5 minutes so why not?

On another note I registered for the Macromedia MAX 2003 conference, which is in Salt Lake this year, from the 19-21 (November). We use ColdFusion a lot, so hopefully I’ll learn some good things. I can attend at least one conference each year so I thought I’d see if this one is any good. If any of you attend other conferences you’d recommend, that’d be valuable for a Web and Database Admin, let me know.

I started reading the new John Grisham book, “Bleachers“, yesterday. So far so good, but I like everything he’s written so that shouldn’t come as a surprise. That reminds me, I think the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s “Timeline” comes out soon. It’s an excellent book, but I’m still a little nervous about the movie. Crichton has a few other good books that turned out to be terrible movies (ie. Congo).

That’s all for now.

I’ve been a little busy lately (as usual). I was working late the other night and noticed a nice sunset outside my window at work. Fortunately I had my digital camera in my bag so I took a few snapshots. I still need to sit down and go through the manual for the camera. I notice almost all the pictures I zoom in on are blurry. Come to think of it, that sunset would have been a good opportunity to try out the panoramic features the camera has.

It’s nice having a window, esspecially one with a view. I don’t miss working in a basement much. Even on the cloudy or rainy days it’s still nice to be able to look out a window. The sunlights a nice bonus also.

Ok, so it’s not really my closet, it’s my cubicle, but I am cleaning it out. Anyway, months after graduation I finally have a new job which I start on Monday. I’ll be working at BYU as a web and database admin. I’m really excited about the new job and to be honest I’m glad I didn’t get any of the previous jobs I applied for cause I’m sure I’ll enjoy this a lot more. Not too mention I’ll enjoy the salary increase, the casual work environment (more casual than my current job anyway), plus I get twice as much vacation time each year. Oh yeah and I get away from tech support and into web and database development. I’m going to miss the System Admin stuff but overall I think it’s going to be a good move.

Both my students are gone on vacation which leaves the weekly system backup in my hands. So, here I am on a perfectly good Friday night, loading tapes. Ok, I’ll be honest it’s not like I’d be doing anything better if I didn’t have to work. Now I’m left with the dilemna of what to do for the next four hours (9pm-1am). I thought about renting a movie but I can’t think of much I want to see right now. I bought a new book the other day, Linux Server Hacks, and haven’t had much time to look through it so that’s an option. I’ll probably end up working on my powerbook. I need to setup a simple script using rsync and ssh to synchronize my public web folder on the server with a directory on my powerbook, but I’m guessing that’ll take all of 15 minutes. I just remembered I didn’t eat dinner, so a walk down to Wendy’s, or the DQ (”always a place for me at the DQ”, those who can name that movie get extra points) or one of the many other eating establishments might be called for. Ah the joys of working the Friday night backup shift. Although it’s not something I like to do on a regular basis I have to admit it’s nice to have the place to myself.

Philip Greenspun has an excellent post about IBM’s effort to move jobs overseas.

…An American has a First Amendment right to free speech. A corporate slave, however, generally forfeits his right to write about things that happen in his workplace as a condition of his employment and as a condition of receiving serverance pay after he is fired. Because the typical corporate slave spends 60 hours per week commuting and working effectively this means that he has no right to write about anything that happens to him for most of his waking hours. If the slave wants to get promoted he probably is wisest not writing or saying anything too controversial even if it does not regard work…

So true! Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike the cubicle environment? On a related note, I was looking at Yahoo!’s job openings the other day and discovered that all but a few were located in India (I only searched for technical jobs). With the way the technical job market has been in the last few years, things may be going from bad to worse.

I’m sure everyone works with people like this. You know the guy. The guy that needs to have the fastest, latest and greatest computer/piece of technology despite the fact he spends the majority of his time doing word processing. This guy at work has been harassing me for months to get more RAM for his computer (he has 256 MB currently). I was open minded to the request and setup a counter on his system to record the memory used to a log file every 10 seconds and let it run for a few days. After reviewing the file I learned he had an average of 100 mb free at any given time and only once in the 5 day period for approximately 1 minute did he exceed 256 MB usage. With statistics like that it’s hard to justify adding more. None the less, he’s been relentless at insisting that’s what’s causing his system to run “slow” (he has a 2 ghz machine by the way). I’m almost to the point of just giving him more RAM so I don’t have to go through this every month. Aggravating!