For the Canberra and Melbourne days which are DBA/HA, registrations for all of the modules in a series before 15 October will receive a copy of the “High Performance MySQL” book (normal bookstore price is AUD 105).

Canberra

• Thu 5 Nov: MySQL High Availability – Strategy and Tools
• Fri 6 Nov: MySQL Cluster Workshop

Sydney

• Mon 9 Nov: MySQL Optimisation by Design
• Tue 10 Nov: MySQL Locking, Transactions & Storage Engine Optimisation

Brisbane

• Thu 19 Nov: MySQL Query Performance Optimisation and Tuning
• Fri 20 Nov: MySQL Server Performance Optimisation and Tuning

Melbourne

• Wed 9 Dec: MySQL Installation, Security and User Management
• Thu 10 Dec – Fri 11 Dec MySQL Backup and Recovery + Replication Workshop

First of all, what screen does. You start screen inside a terminal session (local or SSH remote), and then you can create additional sessions though Ctrl-A C. The initial screen is number 0, the next one 1, and so on. You can switch between screens with Ctrl-A # where # is the screen number. This way, you can have multiple things going within a single ssh connection, very handy. But that’s not all!

If you get disconnected (it happens and you reconnect, your screen sessions will still be there, and running too. You can reattach with screen -r. To do a nice disconnect, you can do Ctrl-A D (detach) before closing your ssh connection.

You can also have multiple screen sessions by name, screens within screens (that confuses me for the control keys so I tend not to use that), and an absolute supertrick is that you can actually share a screen session with someone else. That’s sometimes mighty handy with two engineers to look at something, and also for showing things to clients.

The tool itself is absolutely ancient (aka rock solid, in maintenance mode), I did a quick check and I see references as far back as 1987. I remember using it long long ago, might’ve been a XENIX box. I reckon screen’s authors deserve a prize for creating one of the most useful tools ever!

Default Linux installs often don’t have it, but rectifying that is as simple as sudo apt-get install screen or sudo yum install screen. Then, man screen is your friend, but there are also quite a few decent tutorials on the web.

I was in eager anticipation of this time since the introduction of the concept late last year, as it is of course the essential proof of whether a subscription service actually works over time. Ideally, you’d want renewal to be a simple straightforward process, with the client having experienced the value of the service. This is relatively straightforward in this case, since it’s not an insurance, emergency or retainer type arrangement – the client actually gets benefits each and every month, so there’s both technical progression as well as ongoing human contact. Seems like a winner!

Along the way we also see a steady influx of new clients. I haven’t been specifically chasing this, as all new concepts take a while to mature, and we also had new people internally. The really cool thing is that our business structure for this service is scalable – I won’t say linearly because at some point the # of internal people involved would require adapting some processes, but it’ll scale a fair way still from where we are now.

Elspeth, our Special Projects Operative, who apart from an ace coder&geek is also organisationally organised, has been a great help with some of the admin aspects of the company. We’re paper-less, but that doesn’t mean there’s no paper. We tend to not produce more, but we do get it from others

Kudos to MontyW and PeterZ for driving this further while at the MySQL Conference last month.