There's always a small database somewhere that gets pushed to system administrators without DBA support. Learn some basic skills for maintaining that database. The same skills will help in the middle-ground between sysadmin and DBA.

MySQL is ubiquitous. It will be for many years. A little knowledge will go a long way to having a good MySQL setup. A little knowledge will also leverage your command line knowledge when working with MySQL.

Use shell tools to change the MySQL prompt, run the same query on multiple systems, enable passwordless connection, munge query results and backup/restore databases.

Restorals are paramount, but you can't just backup the database files. Learn about a few useful MySQL backup tools from a system administrator's perspective.

MySQL has grants for controlling access to specific databases, but general system administration tools can be used in addition to the MySQL grants.

It's obvious that the slow query log can be useful for finding long-running queries, but it's not the only place to find useful log information.

The presentation will also cover OS and MySQL changes for good practices that will help the system administrator use and administer MySQL without having to become a DBA.