The latest from the MySQL community

I've just publicly released another Postgres-related script, this one called "boxinfo". Basically, it gathers information about a box (server), hence the catchy and original name. It outputs the information it finds into an HTML page, or into a MediaWiki formatted page.

The goal of boxinfo is to have a simple, single script that quickly gathers important information about a server into a web page, so that you can get a quick overview of what is installed on the server and how things are configured. It's also useful as a reference page when you are trying to remember which server was it that had Bucardo version 4.5.0 installed and was running pgbouncer.

As we use MediaWiki internally here at End Point (running with a Postgres backend, naturally), the original (and default) format is HTML with some MediaWiki specific items inside of it.

Because it is meant to run on a wide a range of boxes as possible, it's written in Perl. …

I’m really proud to announce the release of the version 1.0 of mysql-snmp.

What is mysql-snmp?

mysql-snmp is a mix between the excellent MySQL Cacti Templates and a Net-SNMP agent. The idea is that combining the power of the MySQL Cacti Templates and any SNMP based monitoring would unleash a powerful mysql monitoring system. Of course this project favorite monitoring system is OpenNMS.

mysql-snmp is shipped with the necessary OpenNMS configuration files, but any other SNMP monitoring software can …

The mysqldump filter was created with this need in mind. It allows you to remove all DEFINER clauses and eventually replacing them with a better one.
For example:

mysqldump --no-data sakila | dump_filter --delete > …

This is a little story of a little bug. This gremlin suddenly appeared in a CGI.PM web-based application I work with. To make a long story short, an email was coming out something like this . . . 

389939
Subject:Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins Description:389939 #389939: TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

 . . . when it should have been some thing like this:

Subject: TPDD Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins

TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

After about an hour tracking things back, my team and I narrowed it down to this line of code:

$self->send_TXT_email(CGI::param("rep_no"),$rep_object,
                     $subject,$user_ref);

We scratched our respective heads on this for a while, because for user type ‘A’, it worked fine; but for user type ‘B’, it did not. And …

Maatkit’s mk-loadavg tool is a helpful way to gather information about infrequent conditions on your database server (or any other server, really). We wrote it at Percona to help with those repeated cases of things like “every two weeks, my database stops processing queries for 30 seconds, but it’s not locked up and during this time there is nothing happening.” That’s pretty much impossible to catch in action, and these conditions can take months to resolve without the aid of good tools.

In this blog post I’ll illustrate a very simple usage of mk-loadavg to help in solving a much smaller problem: find out what is happening on the database server during periods of CPU spikes that happen every so often.

First, set everything up.

1. Start a screen session: …

Why a New Utility?

A couple of months back, Tim Procter, Sheeri Cabral and I were discussing about how best to diagnose a MySQL server and/or tune its performance, automating the process as much as possible. The Performance Advisors from MySQL Enterprise do this, but most of our customers don’t have a subscription and Pythian’s collective experience is not necessary reflected by its rules.

In our daily work, we have used Major Heyden’s MySQL Tuner, Mark Leith’s Statpack and our own tools to review a MySQL server configuration parameters. However, all of these tools had limitations in regards of what we wanted to achieve. Our major …

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.013. I've been busy with so many interesting tasks at NorthScale which include keeping my open source projects moving along. I made some time this week to conglomerate some patches that have been submitted and close tickets which this release consists of.

Changes from the changelog:

* #49484: PATCH add support for MYSQL_INIT_COMMAND to
DBD::mysql - Thanks Peter John Edwards!
* #48242: 'mysql_bind_type_guessing' doesn't work correctly
with minus sign - Thanks Serguei Trouchelle!
* #45616: t/40blobs.t cannot pass without database access -
ServerError() not declared - Thanks ysth http://ysth.livejournal.com/

Thanks to all who helped with patches on this release!

The files:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.013.tar.gz
…

Disclaimer: This blog post is about things I did on my own free time, not endorsed by my employer.
I have been meaning to look at Gearman for a long time, but I just couldn't find any project where I could use it.

Well, that was true until last week a couple of weeks ago, when I started to put together Drizzle, the Gearman logging plug-in, Perl and the Enterprise Monitor.

As I was finishing writing the agent.pl script, I thought that it would be a good idea to split the script in at least two components: one that would just collect the queries, and another component that would do the processing of the log entries (replacing the literals for "?", grouping queries by query text, etc).
…

Disclaimer: This blog post is about things I did on my own free time, not endorsed by my employer.
A little over a month ago, Ronald posted a blog about the different query logging plug-ins that are available for Drizzle. This was pretty exciting news, especially when I saw the details that were included in the logs.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I started looking at the REST API that comes with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor.

The result is that we can now see most of the information returned by the plug-in, on the Dashboard.

…

The call for papers for OSDC 2009 is open until 30 June 2009; yes that’s only a few more days. Submit your abstract and do a talk at this fab conference!

This is a grassroots style conference designed by developers for developers.  It covers Perl, Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Java/Grails and Open Source operating systems as well as some business aspects.  If you’d like to cover something else as well that is Open Source themed, please feel free.

The Call for Papers can be found at: http://2009.osdc.com.au/call-for-papers
The important dates are:

• Call for Papers Closes      30 June, 2009
• Proposal acceptance         20 July, 2009
• Accepted paper submissions  14 September, 2009
• OSDC 2009 Main …