Percona Toolkit is one of our most mature open source applications. Derived from Maatkit and Aspersa, Percona Toolkit has evolved significantly over the years. The software now contains 32 tools, over 4,000 tests, and has been downloaded over 250,000 times. Anyone who manages a database – from DBAs to system administrators to even software developers – benefits from Percona Toolkit’s ability to perform a variety of MySQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

We continue to make Percona Toolkit better each month. Over the last 9 months alone Percona has had 6 releases and resolved nearly 50 issues.

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As announced on the Maatkit and Aspersa mailing lists, Daniel and I have created a new toolkit that represents the union of the two, and will be focusing efforts on this Percona Toolkit moving forward. The goal is to make them simpler and significantly more powerful, and to create more tools. The tools will continue to be open-source, but will be developed primarily to meet our MySQL support and consulting staff’s needs.

If you’re interested in challenging software engineering in Perl and shell, then please apply online. You can work online from anywhere, but I strongly prefer someone in the Americas timezones.

Further Reading:

• Planned change in Maatkit & Aspersa …

MySQL databases are great work horses of the internet.  They back tons of modern websites, from blogs and checkout carts, to huge sites like Facebook.  But these technologies don't run themselves.  When you're faced with a system that is slowing down, you'll need the right tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem.  MySQL has a huge community following and that means scores of great tools for your toolbox. Here are 7 ways to troubleshoot MySQL.

1. Use innotop

Innotop is a great tool for MySQL which despite the name monitors MySQL generally as well as InnoDB usage.  It's fairly easy to install, just download the perl script. Be sure to include a [client] section to your local users .my.cnf file (you have one don't you?).  Inside that section, place one line with "user=xyz" and one line with "password=abc".

If you're concerned that installing something new is too …

I’ve just sent an email to the Maatkit discussion list to announce a planned change to how Maatkit (and Aspersa) are developed. In short, Percona plans to create a Percona Toolkit of MySQL-related utilities, as a fork of Maatkit and Aspersa. I’m very happy about this change, and I welcome your responses to that thread on the discussion list.

Related posts:

1. Aspersa, a new opensource toolkit
2. Four companies to sponsor Maatkit development
3. How …

I use Aspersa tools a lot and I find myself going to the website just to download one of the tools all the time. I love I can download maatkit with a simple wget maatkit.org/get/tool command so I made bit.ly shortcuts for all of the current aspersa tools. Here’s the full list with my favorite on the top and least favorite (but none the less very useful) on the bottom:

• http://bit.ly/aspersa-diskstats
• http://bit.ly/aspersa-mext
• http://bit.ly/aspersa-collect
• http://bit.ly/aspersa-stalk
• …

I’ve just committed some changes to diskstats, an I/O analysis tool in Aspersa that’s actually been in the Subversion repository for a long time, but in a barely usable fashion and with no documentation. Now it’s usable and documented.

It is basically a reimplementation of iostat in awk. Why on earth would I reinvent that wheel? Because I spend a lot of time gathering and analyzing raw data from /proc/diskstats, which is vital to really understanding what the storage subsystem is doing. The iostat tool hides important details. Seeing that detail has immediately solved many a disk performance problem and proven SAN vendors wrong, for instance. (I used to do this the old-fashioned way.) Disk performance, of course, is one of the most important …

I’ll be presenting several sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, which is April 11-14 in Santa Clara, California. I recommend this conference to anyone interested in open-source databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB, MongoDB, and others. There is very good coverage of a diverse list of open-source databases.

My sessions are as follows:

• Building on Strengths, Learning from Differences: a keynote address on the open-source database ecosystem, how we got here, and what we can do to make the most of the future.
• Forecasting MySQL Performance and Scalability: mathematical models for forecasting performance and …

I’ve written a tool to profile a process’s IO usage. It works by gathering lsof and strace from a process, and then figuring out how the file descriptors, function calls, and filenames are all related to each other. The manual page has examples. I’m curious to see how it works for you. Note that it might be a good idea to run this on your development or staging system before you go running it against your production MySQL server — there are rumors of strace misbehaving on some kernels.

Related posts:

1. How to find per-process I/O statistics on Linux
2. iopp: a tool …

It doesn’t exist until it is nicely documented. Now Aspersa has documentation. Writing these tools has taught me how powerful and flexible Bash can be. Solving MySQL problems is a lot easier with good tools!

Related posts:

1. Aspersa, a new opensource toolkit
2. Using Aspersa to capture diagnostic data
3. MySQL manual gets improved searching
4. …

For those of you who miss what Maatkit’s mk-audit tool (now retired) gave you, there’s a pair of tools in Aspersa that more than replaces it. I wrote previously about the summary tool. I don’t think I have mentioned the mysql-summary tool. It has been under development for a while, and at this point it has quite a lot of functionality. You can see a sample of the output on its wiki page.

Related posts:

1. Apsersa’s summary tool supports Adaptec and MegaRAID …