Insightful report by Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) on how they prepared to update their central database from MySQL 4.1 to 5.0.

I’ve been working on various different MySQL related issues and maintenance procedures some of which have not gone according to plan. Here is a recipe that may help you avoid wasting a lot of time, especially if your database is large.

Keeping good database backups is crucial because unpredictable disastrous events always occurs. In web-based business – backup is a critical component. There exist different open-source scripts, that could help to organize the database backup process in a customized and easy way, avoiding use of mysqldump (default MySQL backup tool). This article describes various open-source scripts that can help a newbie sysadmin to organize MySQL backup process.