This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. Together you and I found a few bugs in it (table locking, argument quoting, exit status code). The restore utility is in progress.

MySQL Toolkit version numbers are based on Subversion revision number. This release is the first past the 1,000-commit milestone. It also marks several days of being in Sourceforge's top 100 most active projects. It has been in the top 300 for a couple of months, and the top 1000 for, um, a long time. While I would hasten to say I'm not a popularity-contest-focused person, it's rewarding to see that people think this project is important and useful.

This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. I had been using it on a relatively small server; yesterday I took a deep breath and started using it to generate backups from a large server with lots of data and lots of queries. Of course I found a couple bugs and decided I needed more functionality and error handling. The major new functionality is for efficiency; it defers locking as late as possible and releases locks as soon as possible, and with the --setperdb option …

I wanted to point out something that might not be obvious from the name: MySQL Parallel Dump can be used as a generic wrapper to discover tables and databases, and fork off worker processes to do something to them in parallel. That "something" can easily be invoking mysqlcheck -- or any other program. This makes it really easy for you to do multi-threaded whatever-you-need-to-do on MySQL tables. Here's how.

MySQL Parallel Dump can now dump a single table simultaneously into many files of a user-specifed size. This not only helps speed dumps, but it paves the way for much more efficient parallel restores. Read on for the details.

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new parallel dump tool for multi-threaded backups, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to one of the helper scripts.

Kevin Burton wrote recently about why SHOW SLAVE STATUS is really not a good way to monitor how far behind your slave servers are, and how slave network timeouts can mess up the slave lag. I'd like to chime in and say this is exactly why I thought Jeremy Cole's MySQL Heartbeat script was such a natural fit for the MySQL Toolkit. It measures slave lag in a "show me the money" way: it looks for the effects of up-to-date replication, rather than asking the slave how far behind it thinks it is.

The slave doesn't even need to be running. In …

A while ago Peter Zaitsev wrote about his wishes for mysqldump. These included multi-threaded dumps and "safe" dumps that would wait for a server to restart if it crashed, then keep dumping other tables. I've had sketches of this done for a while, but during this week I fleshed it out while writing about backup and recovery for our upcoming book.

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to several of the tools.

This release is part of the unstable 1.5 branch. Its features will ultimately go into the stable 1.6 branch. You can download it from the innotop-devel package.

The major change is I've ripped out the W (Lock Waits) mode and enabled innotop to discover not only what a transaction is waiting for, but what it holds too. The new mode that replaces W is L (Locks). My last article goes into more detail on this.

This article shows you how to use a little-known InnoDB feature to find out what is holding the lock for which an InnoDB transaction is waiting. I then show you how to use an undocumented feature to make this even easier with innotop.