It’s not uncommon these days for us to use a high availability stack for MySQL consisting of Orchestrator, Consul, and ProxySQL. You can read more details about this stack by reading Matthias Crauwels’ blog post How To Autoscale ProxySQL In…

In this blog post, I will describe a few takeaways on how to deploy or submit Machine Learning (ML) tasks on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). If you have less experience as a ML engineer or if you are a solution…

Configuration files management is the core component of every configuration management tool. Templates are one of the best methods for creating configuration files as they allow dynamic variables. Ansible has a template module that uses Jinja2 in its core. Jinja2…

If you work with Data Guard, the lag between the primary and standby database is an informative but difficult metric to measure. I’ve encountered some “solutions” that use the COMPLETION_TIME in (G)V$ARCHIVED_LOG for the standby destination as the time of…

Welcome back to the 2nd part! Last time, we set up the tools that allowed managing the blog as a set of configuration and Markdown-formatted files stored in a source code repository. Now it’s time to deploy the blog on…

I remember when I started blogging in 2008. It was a nice learning experience, and it was rewarding, too – both the challenge of formulating my thoughts clearly and the feedback I received, and still am receiving, on some of…

Continuent Tungsten is one of the few all-in-one solutions for MySQL high availability. In this post I will show you how to automate the upgrade process using Ansible. I will walk you through the individual tasks and, finally, give you…

Google cloud instances run on top of KVM hypervisor. In newer KVM versions, such as the one used in Google Cloud, virtio-scsi is used instead of an older virtio-blk storage backend. The virtio-scsi disk devices looks like: In RHEL6, a module…

Lift and shift migration using tools like Cloudendure is the fastest way to migrate ‘on premises’ systems to Google Cloud. When the migration is complete, the environment can be refactored to use cloud-native capabilities. During application testing after a recent automated…

I’ve been looking into how Vagrant and/or Docker can be used to improve the life of DBAs and maybe others, too. I did this mostly to practice using these tools – especially Docker – that are becoming more and more important…