Atomic Rocket Turtle rocks!

The web server box that I manage with a friend was using mysql 3.23.58. Frankly, it stunk. It was a very outdated version that was very limited. In order to host my largest customer's website, which is very database driven, I needed something better. One HUGE thing I needed was subqueries--it basically ran an entire section of the website. But version 3 lacked this critical functionality. Luckily, MySQL 4.1 fit the bill. Unfortunately, that meant upgrading the mysql programs on our server. I was a little worried because of the dependence of several other programs on the server: plesk, horde, php, coldfusion, etc. that rely on mysql. Fortunately, I stumbled across AtomicRocketTurtle.com. One of the founding fathers of Plesk runs the site, creating "plesk-friendly" rpms for a variety of linux server versions (Fedora 1-4, RedHat, etc). After adding his source files to the yum configuration, stopping critical services, running "yum update mysql mysql-server", and restarting critical services, we were back in business! Total downtime was about 8 minutes. Amazing! Atomic Rocket Turtle rocks!