I did not fall off the face of the earth....

It's been a looong time since I've posted anything. For the past year, I've been focused on operations and streamlining DBA tasks, as the group's responsibilities continues to grow. Its one thing to manage 10-20 production MySQL database servers, but when the number starts climbing to 160-200, things start getting interesting.  For 2010, I expect that number to double. Performance is key, but more important is reliability, uptime, monitoring and notification. Dashboards are a good start, but the most important subsystem will be monitoring. How scalable does the system need to be? For 10-20 off-the-shelf products work fine.  But when thousands of systems need to be monitored, then it starts getting interesting. I'll share my thoughts along the way as far as how we are handling this type of growth.