Institutional Knowledge » Databases

Getting Cute with MySQL Backups

pberry — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:44:12 +0000

When you think you are being smart by only giving your backup user SELECT privileges, don’t forget that you also need to be able to LOCK TABLES to use some of the mysqldump features.

That is all.

MySQL Hilarity

pberry — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:28:28 +0000

From the InnoDB backup section of the MySQL manual.

In addition to making binary backups as just described, you should also regularly make dumps of your tables with mysqldump. The reason for this is that a binary file might be corrupted without you noticing it. Dumped tables are stored into text files that are human-readable, so spotting table corruption becomes easier.

Ummmm, yeah…about that whole reading multi-megabyte text files to look for corrupted data…not gonna happen.

Web Developers’ Do’s and Dont’s

sjungling — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 02:16:40 +0000

Do:

Routinely clear out old data from databases

Don’t

Let the size of your database get out of control

Crazy MySQL Problem

pberry — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 06:14:53 +0000

So, one an older instance of mysql (3.23.58 to be exact) we recently came across a very odd permission problem which I haven’t encountered before. Basically I created a database and then granted all privileges on the database and any of it’s tables to a user on the localhost identified by a password.

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> GRANT all PRIVILEGES on fakedb.* to fakeuser@localhost \
identified BY ‘fakepassword’;
mysql> flush PRIVILEGES;

All afternoon I was getting ERROR 1045: Access denied and it was really starting to annoy me. Of course, I just reset the password on the user and it works now. Not cool. Not cool at all. Maybe the database was just running too hot and needed time to cool off. Maybe it was the Flying Elves™.

Oracle Instant Client, PHP and RHEL

pberry — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 16:19:50 +0000

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

up2date —get-source php
rpmbuild —rebuild —define ‘oracle 1’ php-4.3.2-25.ent.src.rpm

You would think I would be able to find those incredibly simple steps somewhere other than the spec file for RedHat Enterprise Linux php.

I’m just sayin’…

PS — up2date will dump the src.rpm is /var/spool/up2date

PPS — You would think I would be smart enough to remember to specify `—target=i686`. You would, of course, be wrong.

Oracle, You Are Mine!

pberry — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:30:26 +0000

Going through the Enterprise Ruby book I noticed that the first database they talk about is Oracle. So I figured I might as well bite the bullet and get at least one language on my development box (Java not included, JDBC has always worked just fine) working with the Oracle Instant Client.

I thought I had everything installed correctly but I still wasn’t able to connect, even with sqlplus. Turns out it wasn’t entirely my fault. Word from the DBA was:

Oracle’s “Easy Connection Identifier” isn’t easy and doesn’t work as listed.

So there. Anyway, everything is working with ruby and the oci8 module. w00t!