Version 1.5.0 of the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor is out. This release is the first in the unstable 1.5.0 branch, which will eventually become the stable 1.6 branch. I'm beginning to merge the various branches I've made to support some of our needs at my employer. This first release adds some major new features and prepares for some other large improvements and new features.

This release of MySQL Toolkit fixes some minor bugs and adds new functionality to four of the tools. Some of the changes I made were in response to feedback I got at the recent MySQL Camp. I'm still working on some of the feature requests, such as daemon-izing certain tools.

For those who requested features for MySQL Query Profiler, the tab-separated format should give you the desired output: no zero rows, and variables are not renamed.

RPM packages for innotop, a flexible and powerful MySQL and InnoDB monitor I wrote, are now available through the openSUSE buildservice, which builds RPMS on several platforms. Thanks to Lenz Grimmer, SUSE Linux, and Dr. Peter Poeml for making this happen.

A high-performance application that has producers and consumers of some resource, such as a queue of messages, needs an efficient way to notify the consumers when the producer has inserted into the queue. Polling the queue for changes is not a good option. MySQL's GET_LOCK() and RELEASE_LOCK() functions can provide both mutual exclusivity and notifications.

This post was prompted by a message to the MySQL general emailing list some time ago, but I'm finally getting around to actually testing the theoretical solution I mentioned then. I can never just think my way through anything that involves locking and waiting... I have to test it.

I've just released changes to all tools in MySQL Toolkit. The biggest changes are in MySQL Table Sync, which I'm beginning to give sane defaults and options to. Some of the changes are incompatible (but that's what you get with MySQL Table Sync, which is still very rough). I also found and fixed some bugs with MySQL Visual Explain. Thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports.

Note, the formatting overflow in MySQL Query Profiler was not a security vulnerability. It was simply an issue with a Perl formatting code that displayed numbers as hash marks when they got big enough.

MySQL Slave Delay implements an oft-requested replication feature: the ability to make a slave lag its master, a.k.a scheduling binlog events for some time in the future. This will probably be built into MySQL replication someday, but in the meantime, you can use this tool. A delayed slave is great if disaster strikes and propagates through replication, because it lets you stop the delayed slave before it gets corrupted, restart the slave until just before the offending statement, and recover quickly. This is a lot faster than restoring last night's full backup and replaying a day's worth of binary logs on the master.

If you've ever wished you could see MySQL's EXPLAIN output formatted as a tree, now you can. MySQL Visual Explain transforms EXPLAIN output into a hierarchical view of the query plan, which is significantly easier to read and understand.

I've just released changes to two of the tools in MySQL Toolkit. MySQL Table Checksum got some convenient functionality to help you recursively check slaves for bad replicated checksum chunks. MySQL Archiver got statistics-gathering functionality to help you optimize your archiving and purging jobs, plus a few important bug fixes.

Version 1.4.3 of the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor is out. This release fixes some minor bugs and feature annoyances, and at last innotop has thorough documentation, available online!

This release fixes some bugs and improves the chunking functionality. MySQL Table Checksum had a few minor bugs and one major bug with the chunking functionality. I also rewrote the chunking, though the behavior is backwards compatible. I am very happy with the way it works now, and will probably not make any more incompatible changes to it. The changes enabled me to add support for chunking on float, double and decimal columns.

It still doesn't support chunking on character-based columns, though I know now how I'll do it if I do. Also, support for ENUM and SET shouldn't be hard to add. I have no need for these features myself. If you need it, please file a bug report on the Sourceforge tracker.