I'm on the select board of elite people who were duped into reviewing proposals for the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo 2008, and I'm here to tell you how to get your proposal accepted. Aside from bribing me with chocolate, that is.
MySQL Toolkit version numbers are based on Subversion revision number. This release is the first past the 1,000-commit milestone. It also marks several days of being in Sourceforge's top 100 most active projects. It has been in the top 300 for a couple of months, and the top 1000 for, um, a long time. While I would hasten to say I'm not a popularity-contest-focused person, it's rewarding to see that people think this project is important and useful.
This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. I had
been using it on a relatively small server; yesterday I took a
deep breath and started using it to generate backups from a large
server with lots of data and lots of queries. Of course I found a
couple bugs and decided I needed more functionality and error
handling. The major new functionality is for efficiency; it
defers locking as late as possible and releases locks as soon as
possible, and with the --setperdb
option …
I wanted to point out something that might not be obvious from
the name: MySQL Parallel Dump can be used as a generic wrapper to
discover tables and databases, and fork off worker processes to
do something to them in parallel. That "something" can easily be
invoking mysqlcheck
-- or any other program. This
makes it really easy for you to do multi-threaded
whatever-you-need-to-do on MySQL tables. Here's how.
MySQL Parallel Dump can now dump a single table simultaneously into many files of a user-specifed size. This not only helps speed dumps, but it paves the way for much more efficient parallel restores. Read on for the details.
I wrote a couple weeks ago about my work on the Backup and Recovery chapter for High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition. Thanks for your comments and suggestions, and thanks to those of you who helped me over email as well.
I've had several questions about what is included in the chapter, so I thought I'd post the outline as it stands now.
This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new parallel dump tool for multi-threaded backups, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to one of the helper scripts.
Kevin Burton
wrote recently about why SHOW SLAVE STATUS
is really not a
good way to monitor how far behind your slave servers are,
and how slave network timeouts can mess up the slave
lag. I'd like to chime in and say this is exactly why I
thought Jeremy
Cole's MySQL Heartbeat script was such a natural fit for
the MySQL Toolkit. It measures slave lag in a "show me the money"
way: it looks for the effects of up-to-date replication,
rather than asking the slave how far behind it thinks it is.
The slave doesn't even need to be running. In …
[Read more]A while ago Peter Zaitsev wrote about his wishes for mysqldump. These included multi-threaded dumps and "safe" dumps that would wait for a server to restart if it crashed, then keep dumping other tables. I've had sketches of this done for a while, but during this week I fleshed it out while writing about backup and recovery for our upcoming book.
This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to several of the tools.
Progress on High Performance MySQL, Second Edition is coming along nicely. You have probably noticed the lack of epic multi-part articles on this blog lately -- that's because I'm spending most of my spare time on the book. At this point, we have significant work done on some of the hardest chapters, like Schema Optimization and Query Optimization. I've been deep in the guts of those hard optimization chapters for a while now, so I decided to venture into lighter territory: Backup and Recovery, which is one of the few chapters we planned to "revise and expand" from the first edition, rather than completely writing from scratch. I'd love to hear your thoughts and wishes -- click through to the full article for more details on the chapter and how it's shaping up.