I Was A Part-Time Dba. After This Failover Foul-Up, They Hired A Full-Time DBA
The Register, Monday, September 1st, 2025
At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM
No two mistakes are the same, but The Register thinks they're all worth celebrating each Monday when we serve up a fresh edition of Who, Me? - the reader-contributed column in which we share your most magnificent messes, and your means of making it out alive.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Derek" who told us that around 2012 he worked as a part-time database administrator for a company that operated two MySQL instances - one in Boston, USA, and the other on the charming Mediterranean island of Malta - and set up symmetrical replication between them.
Derek thought this was a bad idea because Malta is not regarded as a global connectivity hub, and he felt the goal of symmetrical replication - swift mirroring of any changes made in either location - might be hard to achieve if something damaged a submarine cable to the island.