DB Friday, March 2nd edition

Next week I will be in Mountain View to help with the data center move we are doing. My responsibilities will mostly be remote-style work anyway, but it will be nice to see some of my team members in person. So as I close out this week and reflect about what got done in the Mozilla DB world, I also wanted to make clear why I write these. These posts help answer the questions “What does a DBA do?” and “What does Mozilla use databases for?”

This week in Mozilla databases:

• A database with some tables with a latin1 charset and some tables with a utf8 charset was converted so that all the tables used utf8. This involved exporting using mysqldump --default-character-set=utf8, dropping the table and re-creating it with a utf8 charset, and importing the data.
• The default configuration for MySQL databases at Mozilla has been changed to set the default character set to utf8, and existing configurations have been changed to set the default charset to utf8. We use puppet to set up and maintain configuration files.
• A plan to upgrade our Bugzilla databases has been made, approved, and is in progress. And before anyone asks – yes, it is fully my intention to work on query optimization so that future versions of Bugzilla will have awesome queries; however, there is plenty of internal work to do at Mozilla first!
• Files were generated with the general log and prepared with pt-log-player for benchmarking a system with SSD’s.
• In preparation for our data center move, we promoted a machine in another data center to be the master for our download.mozilla.org service.
• We worked with our Infrastructure Security team gathering data on a security issue.
• Created a new slave for a development web environment
• Currently our physical backups are cold backups where we shut down our backup instance of MySQL and copy files. We have started to work on implementing Xtrabackup for these cases. This is a more long-term project, as backups work fine for now, but every step on the way to using Xtrabackup is a good one. We also use mysqldump for logical backups.
• Created new databases for the ci.mozilla.org service
• Added the custom field “cf_blocking_fennec10″ to the Bugzilla database
• Updated data and schema for the development and staging databases for CaseConductor, a litmus replacement for the QA team
  Last week’s theme was:
  
• There were some tweaks to be made with scripts that use the backups for ETL and updating data for development environments so they would function properly.