A new start always provides an opportunity to reassess your way of doing things:

• “Am I doing the right things with my life?”
• “Which habits could I change — in order to be a better neighbour?” 

Since Karen Tegan Padir took over the MySQL product from Mårten Mickos, we at Sun have taken a thorough look in the mirror.  The result of this introspection allows us to publish our conclusions and new community commitments this week in conjunction with the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara. 

For those who don’t yet know Karen, let me state a few facts: 

• Karen is VP of Sun’s newly-founded MySQL & Software Infrastructure group
• She describes herself as a geek and a straight-shooter, and I can attest to both 
• She was …

I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

I just read about the release of Honey Monitor for MySQL. I read through the features. I looked at the screenshots. Then I read about the licensing. Then I read about the fact that it only runs on windows XP or Vista. So, my questions for the ages…

1. Why, in this age of multiple OSes battling each other for market share, would you write an application that is OS specific? Every app should run in a vendor neutral web browser unless there’s a really really good reason. Monitoring software, are you kidding? Monitoring software must be vendor neutral and web-based. I will never use anything that ties me to windows or linux or osx, it has to be cross platform. End of story.
2. Why, when MySQL is so heavily used on Linux and Solaris, would you write an application for MySQL that can only be run on Windows? Every MySQL DBA …

Given the changes announced this week, I have updated my original plans for my presentation on Sunday. I was going to talk about Social networking, but am now changing it to a very interactive Q&A session.

I expect people are asking themselves

• What has changed?
• What will happen now?
• What are the consequences for the MySQL roadmap?
• Are there other consequences for the MySQL community?

and I will attempt at answering these questions interactively during FOSDEM.

Towards the end of next week, after internal coordination, I plan to share some further thinking on the “what will happen now” front with my blog readers.

What also I plan to do during …

The Monolith Toolkit of scripts for DBA routines. 0.4.3 has been released. You can download it here: http://code.google.com/p/monolith-toolkit/

Some information on the toolkit and what it contains:

• mt-backup-parallel -> runs mysql backups in parallel super fast, has lots of reporting features
• mt-check-replication -> script to report on replication status for slave servers
• mt-rhcluster-check-filesystems -> reports on redhat cluster filesystems (for mysql active/passive clustering)
• mt-rhcluster-script-wrapper -> wrapper script for running any of these scripts on a redhat cluster, chooses the active node to run the script on
• mt-connections-log -> logs connections to mysql to disk, reports on threshold overages
• mt-flush-tables-sequence -> runs through schema.tables to flush in …

Monolith: MySQL server monitoring. I only have servers that run Redhat/Debian/Ubuntu Linux x86 and x86_64. I don’t have machines to test MySQL monitoring for the following OSes. Perhaps you would like to be a test candidate for the new version of Monolith? If so, let me know and you’ll be on the list, as well as get beta testing credit.

OSX Server: PPC and Intel

AIX

FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD

Windows Server

Solaris: Intel & Sparc

Linux servers that are NOT Intel based.

What this involves: testing the client script, perl modules, snmp stats, and other functions that may require a custom client script for that architecture.

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Greg! I absolutely hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL …

With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, …

Progress on the Open Source enterprise grade MySQL monitoring system;  the schema for Monolith version 2 has been designed. Due to the many suggestions for features and the interest it has received I’ve put this on the front burner. That said, here is some more info on the next steps I’ll be taking.

• Monitored servers will use a command line agent (called remotely) to pull information from both MySQL and the OS.
• Historical information will include all values from global status and global variables, as well as CPU/Memory/IO/Disk usage.
• Standard graphing functions - the ones in the list from the previous post - will gather information from various view tables that contain historical data that is collected from the agent script. User defined graphing will allow you to look at historical values over time for any of the various global status or global variable settings (integer based ones anyway). …

What would you like to see in a free enterprise-grade monitoring system for your daily MySQL needs?I’m rewriting Monolith - MySQL DBA Console from the ground up. This will be version 2 and I would like to get some input from the global MySQL community.So far I am going with the following; comment with any improvements/additions.

• Variable interval polling of server statistics
• Over 50 different alerts (see list below)
• Graphing of various server statistics (see list below)
• Tuning recommendations with cnf file changes to apply to server
• Change control documents for recommended performance/security tuning
• Threshold based alerting with multiple alert groups: info,warn,critical
• Sorting/ordering of servers via groups. ie: client -> dev,stage,prod
• RSS feeds for each alert group
• XML export with user defined fields for external applications …