The database team has been pretty busy, since half of it (me!) has been traveling. We will get to that later, but first, I have an important news item to share with you: Bassel Khartabil, an open source developer and a Creative Commons volunteer is being detained in Syria, with no explanation why. His family, including his fiancee, have gotten no reason why he has been detained for over four months. Please read more and sign a petition to free Bassel so he can come home to his family and continue his important volunteer contributions to the open source movement.

In happier news, I mentioned travel. Where I spoke and my slides are listed here:

• At the 1st Latin American Conference on MySQL, NoSQL and the Cloud I co-taught a tutorial on Monitoring MySQL (my monitoring MySQL with Nagios PDF slides) with Gerry Narvaja of Tokutek (and the OurSQL Podcast co-host).

• I also gave a talk on MySQL Security at the conference.

• This week I gave 2 talks in Cali, Colombia and 2 talks in Quito, Ecuador as part of the OTN Latin America Tour (North). Those talks were:
  
  
  
  • Optimizing MySQL Queries using EXPLAIN (given in both Cali and Quito) and do not forget the EXPLAIN cheat sheet by Pythian
    
  • Getting Rid of Cron Scripts Using MySQL Events (Cali only)
    
  • MySQL Security (Quito only)
    

  And in actual work, here’s what the database team has accomplished:
  

• Supported a bugzilla downtime. Submitted for your entertainment, the maintenance page:
  
  
• Did a historical purge of the Crash-stats database
  
• Refreshed the stage db with production data for the Crash-stats database
  
• Migrated the database for our internal app that tracks vacation/sick time (called “PTO”, or “paid time off”)
  
• Started backing up our new webdev database cluster
  
• Audited how we do binary log rotation/purging/backup
  
• Cleared up a lot of legacy development databases that are not used, or do not need to be backed up, on our backup server. This caused the backup server’s development instance to go from over 300G of space used to under 50G, which makes backups faster and more efficient, since we are not backing up redundant databases nor older databases.
  
• Defragmented tables in the support database to get rid of deadlocks that were occurring
  
• Set support database backups to transfer to a support.mozilla.org tools server for developer use
  
• Created backups for the new builder database servers for the Addons service.