Performance Schema (PS) has been the subject of many, many recent discussions, presentations, and articles.  After its release in MySQL 5.7, PS has become the main actor for people who want to take the further steps in MySQL monitoring. At the same time, it has become clear that Oracle intends to make PS powerful with so many features and new instrumentation that old-style monitoring will begin to look like obsolete tools from the Stone Age.

This article will explain PS and provide guidance on what needs to be done in order to use it effectively.

What I am not going to do is to dig into specific performance issues or address polemics about what PS is and what, in a Utopian vision, it should be. I have seen too many presentations, articles and comments like this and they are not productive, nor are they in line with my target which is: keep people informed on how to do things EASILY.

For the scope of this …

Itchy Ninja Software is pleased to announce the release of Analyst for MySQL v1.1. Revolutionize the way you work and administrate MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, and Percona XtraDB installations.

Make More Efficient Use of Your Time

Gathering all of the metrics to diagnose a database installation is a very time consuming process, and many simply do not have the experience to know where to begin. With Analyst for MySQL, you will be able to get your hands on hundreds of metrics within moments. It really takes all of the guesswork, as well as tedious long sessions of writing queries out of managing a MySQL database server.

Cross-Platform

Not only can you run the program on Windows, Mac, or Linux, you can also generate server reports from each of those platforms as well! No need to install anything on the server at any time. All diagnostics are run from your laptop or desktop machine. The …

On servers that are into the swap file and have multiple processes running, I often wonder if it’s MySQL that is in the swap or some other process.  With Linux this is a fairly easy thing to figure out.  Below is the format of a command to do just that:

echo 0 $(cat /proc/`pidof process`/smaps | grep TYPE | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's#^#+#') | bc

In the above command, TYPE refers to what type of Memory you want to examine.  Below are some of the options for this value:

In my previous post, I talked about implementing multi-threaded replication (MTR) using Percona Server 5.6. The server pairs that are utilizing MTR are also exclusively using the TokuDB storage engine.

I find TokuDB to be a fascinating engine. I can tell I will need to re-watch our Dbhangops session where Tim Callaghan talked about the differences between B-Tree and Fractal Tree indexes. There’s also a session on how compression works in …

Some time back, when a client wanted us to setup MySQL Enterprise Monitor, we were surprised to find out that disk monitoring was not available! We worked hard to come up with a solution. Eventually, we decided to setup a custom agent to monitor the disk. Below is the result of that.

While this script may not work as-is for everyone, it should at least provide a basis for such a script. This script has been modified to send an email instead of plug directly into the MySQL Enterprise Monitor. But, it hopefully will get our creative juices flowing…

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script does a very simple test for checking disk space.
#
# Itchy Ninja Software: http://www.itchyninja.com
#

CHECKDISK=`df -h | awk '{print $5}' | grep % | grep -v Use | sort -n | tail -1 | cut -d "%" -f1 -`
ALERT_VALUE="80"
MAIL_USER="root@localhost.com"
MAIL_SUBJECT="Daily Disk Check"

if [ "$CHECKDISK" -ge "$ALERT_VALUE" ]; then
echo "At least one of my disks is nearly …

If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in last week’s webinar on 'Galera Cluster for MySQL vs MySQL (NDB) Cluster: A High Level Comparison'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines VP of Products, Alex Yu, who was part of the team at Ericsson who originally developed the NDB storage engine in 2001, gave an overview of the two clustering architectures and discussed their respective strengths and weaknesses: 

1. MySQL Cluster architecture: strengths and limitations
2. Galera Architecture: strengths and limitations
3. Deployment scenarios
4. Data migration
5. Read and write workloads (Optimistic/pessimistic locking)
6. WAN/Geographical replication
7. Schema changes
8. Management and monitoring …

November 14, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this week's webinar on '9 DevOps Tips for Going in Production with Galera Cluster for MySQL'. If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

In this webinar, Severalnines CTO Johan Andersson discussed 9 key aspects to consider before taking Galera Cluster for MySQL into production:

• 101 Sanity Check
• Operating System
• Backup Strategies
• Galera Recovery
• Query Performance
• Schema changes
• Security / Encryption
• Reporting
• Protecting from Disasters

Watch the replay 9 DevOps Tips for Going in …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …

September 22, 2014 By Severalnines

Need to add phone and SMS alerting to ClusterControl? ClusterControl 1.2.8 introduces support for PagerDuty, an alerting service for Ops teams to schedule on-calls and add phone and SMS notifications to IT tools. By integrating PagerDuty with ClusterControl, you can start receiving phone, SMS and email notifications for all important database events as monitored by ClusterControl. Alerts go directly to the right person who can solve the issue.

This integration is possible thanks to a new plugin interface, that takes ClusterControl alarms in JSON format and outputs to an external system via plugins. Plugins can be either scripts or executable binaries.

We have built a few example …