Top-notch mysql dbas?

Tue May 18 14:49:32 PDT 2004

>
>
>Could somebody refer me to a (or several) very senior mysql dbas? I mean
>very senior, not just somebody who's tinkered with them, and not
>somebody who has used it, but specializes in oracle or sqlserver? 
>

Michael,

If they have that much money, why doesn't your customer -create- the 
expertise they need?

I don't mean this in a pejorative manner. Where does expertise come 
from? Where did we all get our start? Many of us were UNIX 
administrators back when there were no courses on UNIX, or even C.

Did we need Microsoft to teach us TCP/IP, or certify us as competent to 
calculate bitmasks? Of course not. We taught ourselves.

What has changed? Only the industry has ossified; knowledge is still 
freely available, and people are still learning.

Where do hackers come from?

Because that's what you want; a MySQL hacker. Someone who will eat, 
breathe, and live MySQL.

I think if you achieve some clarity on exactly what you want, this will 
enable you to better leverage your considerable assets towards locating 
the appropriate individual(s).

Why not find some young bright kids and turn them loose to become the 
experts you need, with a salary scaled to well-defined benchmarks - that 
correspond to your organizational needs - so that they stay around to 
reap the benefits of their training? Take the money you have earmarked 
for paying your highly paid consultants and, instead, recruit some 
bright young people whose total focus is MySQL, and whose habits have 
not been shaped by other vendors' products? That's what you want, right?

I mean, look. Where do you go to get MySQL training? Europe, that's 
where, because that's where it - MySQL - comes from. I've never met a 
quote-unquote 'trained MySQL DBA' in my life.

Most MySQL DBAs seem to drift into it as a result of being the web 
administrator ... or the systems administrator ... but they are rarely 
adequate to their responsibilities, because their primary training, and 
primary area of interest, is not SQL ... it's HTML, or Javascript, or 
Perl, or shell, or C, or ... and their heart just isn't into it.

Few web administrators have any appreciation for the beauty, or 
importance, of entity relationship diagrams ... and, you know what, not 
too many DBAs appreciate them, either, if the hundreds of 
poorly-designed databases I've seen over the past decade are any 
indication - it's always "add another disk controller", or "we need a 
RAID array" - kind of the whole dot-com phenomenon, in miniature. 'We're 
too busy to think.'

In fact, there is a sharp divide between DBAs and systems administrators 
that is requires special training to bridge. They speak different 
languages ... and they exist on different levels. DBAs live in a world 
of abstractions, where the entire application is designed to insulate 
them, the DBAs, from the question of where, exactly, the data is ... and 
most of them prefer not to think about it. Systems administrators, on 
the other hand, live in a world of cables and devices, with software 
like a layer of frosting, to cover the ugliness beneath.

This divide is aggravated by the disdain with which systems 
administrators are viewed, by DBAs - in fact, at Sybase, the RDBMS 
administrative login is, by default, "system", and DBAs are referred to, 
and refer to themselves as, systems administrators - leading to 
considerable tension and confusion, a state of affairs that , I 
sometimes think, must have been cultivated deliberately.

Look, I've worked for a lot of different database vendors. Oracle, yes, 
but also Sybase, and also Ingres, and /rdb ... and I've also worked with 
MySQL. I know what I speak of.

I'm not a trained DBA, by any means, although I have been trained in 
database administration. But, you know, databases are moving targets, 
and they differ enough from one another that keeping up with all the 
variations available with just one vendor is a full-time task. Just 
installing MySQL, a few months ago, I was struck by all the changes that 
had occurred in MySQL between when I had worked with it last, and the 
present version. But Oracle's no different. Triggers, table, row, cell 
locking, replication and a slew of other new technologies exist to 
differentiate each of the products from one another - and it is these 
extended behaviors that DBAs spend most of their time administering - 
not the core functionality.

I've found it useful to consider a RDBMS as analogous to an operating 
system. As applications go, it is monolithic, and requires that the 
operating system be specially configured - as well as the hardware - to 
leverage maximum performance. It has its own logging, and its own user 
security, and its own filesystem, and its own superuser. Truly, it is 
like an OS within an OS.

You're not going to find anyone who has training in MySQL amongst the 
systems administration community. This is not only because the training 
does not exist, but because hardened SAs tend to hate databases and 
prefer flat files - it is a cultural divide, 'K.I.S.S. versus Rube 
Goldberg' kind of thing.

You're not going to find anyone who has training in MySQL amongst DBAs, 
either, by and large, because there are few DBAs whose expertise spans 
more than one database vendor - there's just too much difference. I've 
never seen a customer that maintained their data on multiple RDBMS 
products, either, so there's no opportunity for heterogeneous DBAs to 
evolve, generally speaking.

If you'd like some help recruiting such people or if you'd like some 
assistance in resolving some very specific problems you may be having 
with MySQL, I'd be happy to help.

One free tip: invite your candidates - not in the ad, but when you 
contact them - to select one book which they believe should be important 
to a DBA, from their bookshelf, bring it in, and explain why. This is a 
great way to separate the kernels of wheat that you are seeking, from 
the chaff.

Regards,

-- richard

-- 

Richard Childers / Senior Engineer
Daemonized Networking Services
945 Taraval Street, #105
San Francisco, CA 94116 USA
[011.]1.415.759.5571
http://www.daemonized.com

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Michael T. Halligan wrote:

>Could somebody refer me to a (or several) very senior mysql dbas? I mean
>very senior, not just somebody who's tinkered with them, and not
>somebody who has used it, but specializes in oracle or sqlserver? 
>
>The company I work for is trying to hire two reliable, senior dbas, or at least
>find one really good mysql consultant who is reliable.. I'll spell it
>out:  We pay very well.
>
>
>-------------------
>Michael T. Halligan
>Chief Geek
>Halligan Infrastructure Designs.
>http://www.halligan.org/
>3158 Mission St. #3
>San Francisco, CA 94110
>(415) 724.7998 - Mobile
>
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