You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Housewarming; also Eggs, Sandman, and Stressful Sundays

Okay, weirdness time - there's a cute cartoon flash video of why it's good to eat eggs, which is, as it turns out, a translation from the original Korean; and there's even a I Love Egg website.

I'm not actually sure how I got to there from here; a weird coincidence, given Jenni's random white egg.

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Housewarming on Friday evening - I've sent out a bunch of email, but in case I'm a dumbass and have forgotten to send you an invite, just email me and I'll reply with the relevant details. I'm hoping the relative spontaneity will mean that I won't stress about properly catering too much. One downside - it's a Friday and still Lent, so while I'll be providing a BBQ, I won't be eating any of the Sizzlers.

I hope it all goes well. On the plus side, I haven't been in the house long enough for it to get very messy; on the minus side, I spent my weekend doing Other Stuff, so the only things that will be done around the house are whatever I can squeeze into my evenings and/or lunchtimes.

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The big DB migration, moving our production servers across to new machines and upgrading them from version 3.something to 4.0 went well. Like, really frighteningly well. I'm still waiting for the thing that will go horribly wrong, wipe out days of production, and cost us millions of dollars - which will be All My Fault. It hasn't happened yet, but I can't stop knocking on wood every time I say that it all went smoothly.

Oh, it wasn't perfect - it took longer than I thought it would, and there were one or two minor hiccups. But it was a change to one of the core things in our system, so if it had all irrevocably gone to custard, it would have been very bad indeed - which was why I was pretty darn careful to try to make sure we could back to where we were originally. I'd done the same migration with three or four less critical systems in the recent past, or we wouldn't have considered making this change so far into production; but we were recently bitten by one a big problem that's easy to deal with in 4.0, and quite hard to deal with in 3. This will protect us if it happens again.

(For the curious - our big, big win is replication. It's a lot easier and quicker to be able to go "LOAD DATA FROM MASTER" on the slave, than have to go through the seven or eight steps manually copying the files from the master and installing them on the slave. This is a big deal, especially when you're trying to deal with whatever caused replication to fail in the first place.)

Anyway - a very stressful, but so far successful, Sunday. I hope that we don't try anything like that again until after delivery. Of course, the worst thing would be if something went wrong now, and we suddenly had to move a day's worth of data back... [sounds of furious wood knocking]

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Four paragraphs on database migration? Well, come on, it's a database administrator's blog! ;) Besides, I didn't even write about how I was freaking out on Friday, because "LOAD DATA FROM MASTER" was mysteriously failing with a "Net read error", and it turned out that the problem was that some of the tables were ISAM, rather than MyISAM... Okay, okay, now I'm done. ;)

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I mentioned to some people that I'd found one of the Sandman screenplays. I've just finished reading it - interesting. I'm reminded that Terry Pratchett's Patrician preferring to read sheet music, rather than seeing a bunch of overweight musicians hitting the occasional bum note and drooling out of their clarinets. Reading unfilmed screenplays has a certain clarity to it; one of the interesting things is what is seen as essential, and what's superfluous.

I'd still quite like to see a finished Sandman project, though.

Posted by svend at March 4, 2005 4:17 PM