Re: young guy wanting (Postgres DBA) ammo

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 00:03 -0400, Kevin Hunter wrote:
> - More in line with the conversation with my friend, what/why is it that
> Postgres needs a DBA while MySQL doesn't?  I highly suspect that the
> assumption that MySQL doesn't need a DBA is incorrect, but that's what
> was posed to me and I couldn't agree or disagree.

Before I was a DBA I worked as a developer in shop that had both PG and
MySQL running.  We had no DBA, or anyone at that time that really
understood databases from a DBA side.

The stuff that we had running in PG just worked.  Period, no problems
(and this was on PG 7.0).  The stuff we had in MySQL, well, that
"mysteriously" ground to a halt every night at the same time, making
several customers applications unavailable.  Without anyone on staff
that could actually diagnose the issue, the only soution that they came
up with (and I emphasise the word they, as I had no part in this :-))
was a cron job was that restarted the MySQL server every night.

--
Brad Nicholson  416-673-4106
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.