Mark Wong’s entry titled “Following up a couple questions from the presentation at PSU on January 8, 2009” just caught my eye:

What is ‘iopp’?

It’s a custom tool to go through the Linux process table to get i/o statistics per process. It is open source and can be downloaded from:

http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~markwkm/iopp.git;a=summary

If you know me, you know I [...]

If you have max 15 minutes and want to try out MySQL Replication (geo redundancy) between two Clusters on your localhost (only tested on Linux) or on vmware then this Sandbox is for you.

Here is what you have to do:

1. Go to www.severalnines.com/sandbox
2. Create a master cluster:
   I have used the ports 1186 (for the management server) and 3306 and 3307 for the mysql servers).
   
3. Enter the email address and a set of scripts to install cluster will be sent.
4. Create a slave cluster:
   Make sure you use different ports for the slave cluster. I have used the ports 1187 (for the management server) and 3310 …

Last week I had to confront one of those situations where you can’t really tell what is going on with a piece of software, and the final conclusion would sound completely crazy if postulated as the initial hypothesis. The regular MySQL commands and utilities fall short in these cases, so I had to resort to the three tools reviewed in this article.

The problem we were diagnosing was this: at some point in time, a number of queries that use to take less than one minute to execute, started to take between five to 15 minutes. We needed to get an insight into what was going on inside the MySQL server.

MySQL Tuner

At some point in a long diagnosis process, MySQL’s SHOW [GLOBAL] VARIABLES and SHOW [GLOBAL] STATUS are nothing more than a long list of numbers. Going through a team mate’s notes on another issue, I came across MySQL Tuner. This is an …

cmon 0.12 is now released and can be downloaded from www.severalnines.com/cmon.

Release notes:

• connection handling - cmon will now retry connects forever. cmon will also recover and automatically reconnect to cluster after a cluster failure or if the connection to the mysql server crashes where cmon logs information. This means you will have to terminate the cmon using e.g 'killall cmon' or /etc/init.d/cmon stop
• disk data - cmon now gathers information about the amount of table space used and this is presented in the web interface
  
• init.d scripts - fixed bugs in creating the init.d scripts during make install-extra
• fixed compiler warnings - now 0 compiler warnings on Linux systems
• mysql_statistics table - now explicitly using engine=myisam
• web interface - changed printout if cmon …

MySQL just released their new MySQL Query Analyzer (link to a trial), and recently wrote up an interview with Mark Matthews about it. If you haven’t read that article, go ahead and do it. I have not used this software, but I fully believe its functionality is quite nice.

But there is at least [...]

Everyone does backups. Usually it’s some nightly batch job that just dumps all MySQL tables into a text file or ordinarily copies the binary files from the data directory to a safe location. Obviously both ways involve much more complex operations than it would seem by my last sentence, but it is not important right now. Either way the data is out and ready to save someone’s life (or job at least). Unfortunately taking backup does not come free of any cost. On the contrary, it’s more like doing very heavy queries against each table in the database when mysqldump is used or reading a lot of data when copying physical files, so the price may actually be rather high. And the more effectively the server resources are utilized, the more that becomes a problem.

What happens when you try to get all the data?

The most obvious answer is that it needs to be read, through I/O requests, from a storage that it resides on. The storage is …

I’ve released version 1.1.1 of the MySQL Cacti templates I develop. The new templates work around more Cacti limitations, including the limitation on the length of the data returned from the poller script. There’s also a new graph and many other niceties since the last release.

Note that there are TWO incompatible changes with [...]

Download Maatkit

There’s a new release with a lot of goodies — speed, efficiency, user-friendliness, and new features. In particular some of Percona’s clients have sponsored features for things they need such as the ability to more frequently verify that slaves are in sync with their masters. If you need features, please ask Percona [...]

Hartmut rules!It started during …

After last week’s post on agents versus agentless monitoring systems, I got a lot of email. One, from a customer whose name I am not permitted to mention, sent me the following action shot (posted with permission):

Over half a gigabyte; more than twice what MySQL itself is using. So, that raises an interesting [...]