I am considering taking some time off work to concentrate deeply on MySQL Table Sync, which has been getting usage in very large companies whose names we all know. There are a lot of bugs and feature requests outstanding for it. It is overly complex, needs a lot of work, and I can't do it in one-hour or even three-hour chunks. I need to focus on it. I'm considering asking for a bounty of $2500 USD for this. Please let me know what you think of this; it seems to be a successful way to sponsor development on some other projects, like Vim.

For the amount of time I think this will take, $2500 is far below my per-hour consulting rate; I considered setting the bounty higher, but I think this will be a fair amount.

I would not begin this project before December at the earliest, so there's some time to raise funds and time for me to continue working on High Performance …

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 …

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new tool, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to several of the tools.

Catching up on some articles on the Planet MySQL feed, I just read the post by Dathan on how to promote a slave to be master by using MASTER_POS_WAIT(). The MASTER_POS_WAIT() is an excellent function that allows you to wait until the slave reaches a point at or after the given binlog position. Observe that after the statement issuing a MASTER_POS_WAIT() returns, the slave threads are still running, so this means that even if a STOP SLAVE is issued immediately after the statement with MASTER_POS_WAIT(), it is bound to move a little more before actually stopping. For Dathan's situation, this is not necessary, but wouldn't it be great if you could stop a slave at exactly the position that you want? Well, that …

MySQL Slave Delay implements an oft-requested replication feature: the ability to make a slave lag its master, a.k.a scheduling binlog events for some time in the future. This will probably be built into MySQL replication someday, but in the meantime, you can use this tool. A delayed slave is great if disaster strikes and propagates through replication, because it lets you stop the delayed slave before it gets corrupted, restart the slave until just before the offending statement, and recover quickly. This is a lot faster than restoring last night's full backup and replaying a day's worth of binary logs on the master.

Is MySQL giving you the error message "ERROR 1200 (HY000): The server is not configured as slave; fix in config file or with CHANGE MASTER TO" when you try to run START SLAVE? There are a few simple troubleshooting steps to take, but I always forget what to do. This article is to help me remember in the future!

I've just released changes to two of the tools in MySQL Toolkit. MySQL Table Checksum got some convenient functionality to help you recursively check slaves for bad replicated checksum chunks. MySQL Archiver got statistics-gathering functionality to help you optimize your archiving and purging jobs, plus a few important bug fixes.