Not too long ago, I, Mr. Check-me-out-I’m-so-technical-and-cool, had a catastrophic data loss.  As implied by the use of the word ‘catastrophic’, I lost some stuff that… I did not want to lose.  At all. Lost, lost.  Too bad.  Sucks to be me.  How could this happen to a guy who does this for a living?  I’ll tell you how: procrastination.

I knew that off-site storage was necessary.  I have space on remote servers in secure locations… one of these days, I’m going to figure out a good way to, uh… hey, I gotta go pick up the pizza!

But, it’s worse than that.  I actually have a mirrored-disk, network-attached storage (NAS) box specifically for backups.  I have external drives specifically for making local backups, too.  So, short of my office burning down, I should be covered, no?  Uh… no. (continue reading…)

Last time, I wrote about options for backing up MySQL, but I talked about them as though there is one kind of database, the MySQL database.  However, that’s not at all true.  There are two main types of storage engine used in MySQL– MyISAM and InnoDB.  In fact, there are many more, but these are the two most commonly used without special requirements. This is about the point where those of you not interested in the more, well, “technical” aspects of databases might want to go outside for a walk. (continue reading…)

Moving to MySQL

I’m currently involved in moving an application from SQL Server (2000) to MySQL.  The reasoning isn’t terribly relevant, but primarily it’s an open source v. closed source issue.  This (aging) J2EE app required a proprietary bridge between the application server (Java on Linux) and the database (SQL Server on Windows 2000 Server).  That odd adapter has caused us all stress over the years.  Being proprietary, we didn’t know exactly how it worked nor whether it would be around tomorrow. (continue reading…)