Once again, I was unable to attend all of the sessions I wanted to at this year's User Converence, but I was happy to make it to Bob Burgess' talk on bash scripting with mysql. The slides and examples aren't up yet, but when they are (which may be as you read this, check the last link), they would probably also be a great tutorial.

So, I got bore\^D\^D\^D\^D inspired later that day to put some of the practices into use, and worked up a script to run mysqlslap in various ways against a server, and then added a couple funcitons to try it out on each storage engine. The script is below in its entirety - bash scripters, please be kind in your comments. No, I didn't write all this just for the pun in the …

Giving a bunch of mysql instances something you do everyday and you might think ….. how should I do it? Write a bunch of selects and inserts manually? nahh that takes s**tload of time, should I run binlogs collected from a live system on my test server? nahh thats not practical nor is it real since it doesn’t contain selects, should I gather the general query log and try that out? nahhh  …..

MySQL has been kind enough to supply us with their mysql_slap which does the job for us and given I needed to do a proof of concept on monitoring a group of 4 circular replicated servers I wrote a small script which does the job of slapping them with a varying level of concurrancy, iterations, number of queries and connections for as long as you like.

Here it is and I hope some of you might find it useful for slapping their own test servers :).

#!/bin/bash

NumberOfConcurrentLoads=4
…