Originally Posted 10/13/2014

Like any good North Carolina boy, I appreciate good whole hog barbecue.  Some from the western part of the state would say that the only part of the pig worth barbecuing are the shoulders, but I’ve always been a whole hog kind of guy.  With some slaw and a few hush puppies, it doesn’t get any better.  While I love my barbecue whole hog, that is typically not the way I operate professionally.  As a Database Administrator I tend to be more conservative when it comes to the adaptation of new technologies.  That is not to say that I don’t like playing with new things.  It just means that I like to role out new technologies in a way that ensure early success for myself and the business.

Currently, I find myself in a situation where I have to put all my chips on the table.  The business has an application that has become critical to the business.  It was built on top of MySQL and based on some strategic decisions and time pressures it was decided that porting it to another platform was not the way to go.  So, while I am excited to be adding MySQL support with my team, I am also a bit nervous to be taking off such a large bite.  Starting off support for a new platform with such a critical and highly visible system is not the way I normally like to go.

I have a great team of DBAs that I work with.  Some of us already have varying degrees of experience with MySQL.  So I am confident that we will make this a success.  We have already started a MySQL training study group to get up to speed on MySQL administration.  We have also been installing and playing with MySQL in different High Availability configurations.  So while I am a bit nervous, I am not really worried.  I also feel that the Modern DBA needs to learn to let go and trust their training and experience.  The speed of IT is only increasing.  The technologies are ever changing.  We need to realize that sometimes the business needs us to adapt and take risks.  But we also need to realize that they want us to manage those risks.

I hope to keep you all up to date on how this project goes.  Until then, grab a fork and some nana pudding.  We are going whole hog.