Database Server Maintenance - Jan 17

As announced in OnSite and our public status page, we'll be taking our MySQL 5 server (db1.modwest.com) offline for up to thirty minutes tomorrow (Thursday) night around 7PM Mountain Time for system upgrades. If your site utilizes this server and you're a programmer (or have one nearby), you may want to consider making sure your web applications handle the maintenance window gracefully. (I'll post a technical comment below for one way to do so.)

Speaking of MySQL, the company that produces this excellent open-source database software was just  acquired by Sun Microsystems, an enterprise hardware and software company. Only time will tell, but we anticipate this will result in some powerful improvements to the already-great MySQL software.

-JM