database

I was reminded recently about how a GitLab engineer managed to delete the prod database, and that got me thinking about one of my biggest (production) mistakes.

It's been at least 5 years since this happened so I think it's safe to tell the story of when I dropped a production database of one of my clients.

At the time I was working on a (pretty large) Drupal website for an international organization. The site consisted of an extensive content area and allowed users to make anonymous purchases through the website, which were sent to a CRM every night. It was hosted on the Acquia platform and used BLT to perform the day-to-day development operations on the site.

MySQL's slow query log is a key component in your MySQL administration setup. Whilst normal logging can help you in terms of tracking down issues with your database system, the slow query log can help you track down issues in your database setup before they become problematic.

Getting the slow query log set up correctly can help you find and solve issues with slow database queries before they become more problematic. Most slow queries will work fine when there's just a few rows, but as your data grows so will the time taken to find the data. Having the slow query log in place will show these queries and help you do something about them.

A good security tip when installing your Wordpress blog is to change the database table prefix, the idea is that this will hide the tables from any hackers looking to compromise your blog. This can be done in the wp-config.php file and the variable $table_prefix. Changing this value from the default wp_ to, for example, blog_ will change the table wp_posts to blog_posts, making it more difficult for hackers to find it. Using blog_ is only an example, you should treat the prefix like a password, include letters and numbers to make it more difficult to find.

But what happens if you have installed your system and want to change the prefix? Well you need to change the $table_prefix variable in your wp-config.php file and alter the tables in your Wordpress database. Which one you do first is up to you, but you should go them both as fast as you can. Here are some MySQL statements that should help you to do this.