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My Hands Remember MySQL
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My Hands Remember MySQL is an on-line course that gives students real experience with cleverly broken cloud servers, and tests their progress in a high-feedback, low-consequence environment.

Who cares?

If you're a sys admin, developer, or an IT professional responsible for applications that happen to be backed by MySQL, you've come to the right place.

If you're already a professional DBA, this is probably not the course for you. If you're looking for a language-specific developer class, this isn't it either.

What's so great about this course?

My goal in creating My Hands Remember MySQL was to create the course I wish I had when I started managing my first MySQL database, my first replication, my first horrific multi-day outage.

You know what I love? Exercises. Dirty hands. Stories that begin "you are not going to believe the day I just had." So the course I'm building is hands-on first and theory a distant second.

I've built a series of servers that are broken in interesting ways. Every lesson kicks off with an overview of what you're trying to accomplish, and how this might happen in "the real world." While you're reading that, I'm spinning up a virtual server with your name on it. When it's cooked, you go fix it, with a series of steps and automated tests to show your progress and teach you how to catch a heap of likely mistakes.

In a nutshell, this course is great because you get to make your n00b mistakes on my servers. Then you go back and do your best work on yours.

What does it cover?

This is a course about caring for MySQL so that you can get something else done. I've used MySQL with phone systems, mailing list managers, e-commerce backends, user databases, ticket trackers, and more hacky afternoon projects than I care to remember. I've never lit up a MySQL database just because I really like ASCII tables.

So this course will cover making MySQL rock-solid, so you can go back to thinking about the value-delivering app on top of it.

Specifically, we'll cover:

  • Disaster recovery (starting with replication)
  • Backups and restores
  • Scaling reads (read-slaves)
  • Scaling writes (shards)
  • Finding and improving slow queries
  • Fixing common ways you can use MySQL to shoot your own foot
  • Fixing uncommon ways MySQL can shoot your foot for you

Sign up for the
MySQL Tip
of the Week

Every week, you'll get a tip about using MySQL more efficiently. Topics will include tuning, tools, new features, and more efficient deployment architecture.

MySQL Replication

We've got big ambitions for the complete My Hands Remember MySQL course, and we've launched the first stand-alone module already: Replication.

You replicate data because it's important. Treat your important data right, and get concrete experience with replication in our hands-on course.

What's in this module?