Problem: You've a large table (or two) in a database on a partition that's running out of space, and you want to see if you can move that table to another drive.

Solution: Well, several actually. No silver bullet, but several options, some with conditions and some that require preparation. Let's look at some background information first.

How MySQL Stores Data 

OK, that's somewhat of an ambitious heading for an incidental paragraph or two, so to tone it back a bit, I'll summarise briefly.

• The data directory is where MySQL stores databases, and it's set by the datadir server option. Each database is stored in a subdirectory of the data directory. You can also save a considerable amount of space without moving data around, by …

Pythian DBA’s have daily reports for each monitored database and some of the components are using charts to visualize the data. I’m a big fan of charts myself (when applied appropriately) and want to show how you can generate simple charts directly from the database. You’d be very surprised how easy it can be done from *any* database without installing any additional software or configuring something special.

This method is not limited to Oracle by any means — use it with MySQL, SQL Server or any other database as well as without a database — yes, visualize your sar data now!

In this example, we will plot a pie diagram with Oracle tablespaces. This would be very handy when you are starting to analyze the space allocation for a database. Here is the end result of the report for my Grid Control repository test database:

The secret …