I have been using Maatkit in a different way since I joined Percona as a consultant. When I’m working on a system now, it’s a new, unfamiliar system — not one where I have already installed my favorite programs. And that means I want to grab my favorite productivity tools fast.

I intentionally wrote the Maatkit tools so they don’t need to be “installed.” You just run them, that’s all. But I never made them easy to download.

I fixed that. Now, at the command line, you can just run this:

wget http://www.maatkit.org/get/mk-table-sync

Now it’s ready to run. Behind the scenes are some Apache mod_rewrite rules, a Perl script or two, and Subversion. When you do this, you’re getting the latest code from Subversion’s trunk.[1][2] (I like to run on the bleeding edge. Releases are for people who want …

Update: Karanbir says “Just one thing to keep in mind is that we dont want too many people using it from the Testing repository - we only need enough feedback to move it from testing to stable ( and to be honest, there are already 8 people who have said yes it works - so move to stable should happen within the next 24 - 48 hrs ). Once the package is in stable, users on CentOS4 and 5 wont need to do anything more than just ‘yum install maatkit’ and it will install for them.”

At least one person (Karanbir Singh) is working to get Maatkit into the CentOS repositories, and I believe there might be movement towards RHEL also. From an email to the Maatkit discussion list a little while ago,

I am in the process of getting maatkit into the CentOS-Extras …

I did an interview with Barton George from Sun while I was at the conference last week. Barton has now posted the interview. If you’re quick, you can listen to it before I do.

Topics: everything and anything, including Maatkit and PostgreSQL.

Baron Schwartz, Barton George, maatkit, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, Podcast, …

Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times.

Inside the PBXT Storage Engine

This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques. I had been looking forward to this session for a while, and Paul McCullagh’s nice explanations with clear diagrams were a welcome aid to understanding how PBXT works. Unlike some of the other storage engines, PBXT is being developed in full daylight, with an emphasis on community involvement and input. (Indeed, I may be contributing to it myself, in order to make its monitoring and tuning capabilities second to none).

PBXT has not only a unique design, but a …

Day two of the conference was a little disappointing, as far as sessions went. There were several time blocks where I simply wasn’t interested in any of the sessions. Instead, I went to the expo hall and tried to pry straight answers out of sly salespeople. Here’s what I attended.

Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources

This was a talk focused on how MySQL has made it possible for community members to contribute to MySQL. There was quite a bit of talk about IRC channels, mailing lists, and the like. However, the talk gave short shrift to how MySQL plans to become truly open source (in terms of its development model, not its license). I think there was basically nothing to talk about there. I had a good conversation about some of my concerns with the speaker and some others from MySQL right afterwards.

There was basically nobody there — I didn’t count, but I’d say maybe 10 or 12 people. I …

Today is the first day at the conference (aside from the tutorials, which were yesterday). Here’s what I went to:

New Subquery Optimizations in 6.0

By Sergey Petrunia. This was a similar session to one I went to last year. MySQL has a few cases where subqueries are badly optimized, and this session went into the details of how this is being addressed in MySQL 6.0. There are several new optimization techniques for all types of subqueries, such as inside-out subqueries, materialization, and converting to joins. The optimizations apply to scalar subqueries and subqueries in the FROM clause. Performance results are very good, depending on which data you choose to illustrate. The overall point is that the worst-case subquery nastiness should be resolved. I’m speaking of WHERE NOT IN(SELECT…) and friends. It remains to be seen how this shakes out as 6.0 matures, and what edge cases will pop up.

The Lost Art Of the Self …

MySQL just gave me an award at this morning’s keynote, along with Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (for the second year in a row!) and Diego Medina, for my code contributions to the MySQL community, specifically Maatkit, which makes it easier to make MySQL reliable, fast, and robust. It’s an honor to be recognized. And while I could leave it at that, I’d like to say a word or two more.

The economy, community, and ecosystem that’s building around Free Software can often be very rewarding financially. This is a great motivation; being rewarded for your efforts is one of the chief virtues of a culture of entrepreneurship, along with the idea that to try and fail is just as noble as to succeed. But I find that isn’t enough. If I were only rewarded financially and with recognitions such as this morning’s, I would quickly become bankrupt at a …

I’m at the MySQL Conference and the t-shirts I created for Maatkit have arrived. Come get yours! They are high-quality, attractive shirts you’ll be proud to wear, and they are a nice rich wine-red color.

Harrison Fisk (co-author of MySQL Clustering) got the first one, because he told me that he recommends Maatkit to MySQL Support customers about twice a week. I made sure to save one for Jay Pipes too, because his luggage got lost so he has nothing to wear. Unfortunately, I didn’t make any Maatkit underwear, sorry Jay. Now I know what to do for next year…

…

Effective April 1, I will join Percona full-time as a consultant. I’ll be helping people build high-performance applications with MySQL, but I’ll also be continuing to develop and improve tools such as Maatkit.

This career change has been a long time in progress. I’m really looking forward to it, but at the same time it’s hard to leave my current employer, The Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG). Working with them has been the best job I’ve ever had. But ultimately, my dream job is to help as many people as I can, and consulting will be a better way to do that.

At a time like this, I like to reflect on the trail that has led here. It’s a good opportunity to realize how fortunate I really am and fill up my gratitude tank. So I’d like to thank everyone who has …

If you're serious about MySQL, it doesn't hurt to know the people closely tied to its development and maintenance as well as famous bloggers. Here's my ongoing list of people I consider important:

Peter Zaitsev - MySQL Performance Blog, former head of MySQL AB High Performance Group. His company Percona is available for consulting. He's a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition (great book).

Baron Schwartz - also know as Xaprb, Baron a co-author of High Performance MySQL 2nd edition and creator of …