The latest from the MySQL community

For the last couple of months, we've been quietly developing a MySQL protocol parser for Maatkit. It isn't an implementation of the protocol: it's an observer of the protocol. This lets us gather queries from servers that don't have a slow query log enabled, at very high time resolution.

With this new functionality, it becomes possible for mk-query-digest to stand on the sidelines and watch queries fly by over TCP. It is only an observer on the sidelines: it is NOT a man in the middle like mysql-proxy, so it has basically zero impact on the running server (tcpdump is very efficient) and zero impact on the query latency. There are some unique challenges to watching an entire server's traffic, but we've found ways to solve those. Some of them are harder than others, such as making sense of a conversation when you start …

A post by Ronald reminded me I wanted to write about watch. The Linux watch command is a fab tool, it allows you to run a program at a set interval, such as every 5 seconds. Handy for keeping an eye on stuff!

Update 2009-06-30: yesterday I wrote “… watch does not re-load and run the program, but goes in and resets the program counter.” (and was un-recommending it for use on production systems for that reason). I was blindly quoting an otherwise trusted source, and it was wholly wrong. Numerous people had a peek at the source code (all the way back to 1997) and found the popen(). So, I stand corrected and my apologies for not doing extra homework in the first place before posting! (I’m leaving the comments as they are)

I’m decently familiar with grep so I can usually make it do what I want. I frequently need to search for instance MySQL source code for certain pattern strings, and this makes life so much easier. But Akash pointed out ack to me, which has the specific tagline “better than grep” (has the domain even) and I reckon it does live up to that. Win! It’s written in pure Perl, very easy to install (doesn’t even use CPAN if you don’t want).

It recurses into subdirs by default, while ignoring stuff like revision control and binary files. You can search specific types of files through a symbolic name rather than by specifying regexes. And it has colour highlighting, and simply uses the familiar Perl regexes for its pattern matching rather than funky subsets of which there are many distinct ones…

I tweaked the mext script so it auto-detects the necessary column widths for each sample.

Get mext here.

There’s actually no single “correct” answer! It all depends on

1. where in a stack the component lives;
2. the state of the market for that component region;
3. sometimes even geographic location of the user comes into play.

Yes, for OSS projects modularity is handy in terms of handling contributions, but modularity may not be the best way to deal with a problem in a certain market state and situation!

Research has shown (see, for example, “The Innovator’s Solution” by Clayton Christensen) that the “integrated” region over time actually shifts to a subcomponent of an original integrated component that has since gone modular. An interesting example of this for MySQL its pluggable storage engine interface since version 5.1. MySQL is more modular now, but individual storage engines are tightly integrated for performance reasons, and in some cases they are even proprietary. …

Mike Hillyer talks about MySQL Workbench. Very nice workshop! (Hillyer will make slides and screen recording of his talk available.)

This is a great platform-native application. All presentation code is written for each specific platform. It is the second most-popular download and the second most purchased product in the MySQL online shop.  There's a community edition and there's a standard edition of the Workbench. People in the workshop got a 1 year subscription to the commercial, standard edition.

I'm sitting in the room here in MySQL Conference. I'm running a WB 5.1 edition I've built on my MacBook Pro laptop.

Mike Hillyer talks about MySQL Workbench. Very nice workshop! (Hillyer will make slides and screen recording of his talk available.)

This is a great platform-native application. All presentation code is written for each specific platform. It is the second most-popular download and the second most purchased product in the MySQL online shop.  There's a community edition and there's a standard edition of the Workbench. People in the workshop got a 1 year subscription to the commercial, standard edition.

I'm sitting in the room here in MySQL Conference. I'm running a WB 5.1 edition I've built on my MacBook Pro laptop.

Mike Hillyer talks about MySQL Workbench. Very nice workshop! (Hillyer will make slides and screen recording of his talk available.)

This is a great platform-native application. All presentation code is written for each specific platform. It is the second most-popular download and the second most purchased product in the MySQL online shop.  There's a community edition and there's a standard edition of the Workbench. People in the workshop got a 1 year subscription to the commercial, standard edition.

I'm sitting in the room here in MySQL Conference. I'm running a WB 5.1 edition I've built on my MacBook Pro laptop.

I always say that the ultimate MySQL tuning script is an expert human. To that end, I generally try to build tools that help a human be more productive with the raw information from MySQL. One of the things we look at during a performance audit is the MySQL status counters. It’s useful to look at a) absolute values and b) several incremental snapshots. I’ve written a small shell script called “mext” that can make this a little easier.

It looks like this:

baron@kanga:~$ mext -- mysqladmin ext -ri1 -c3
Aborted_clients                               1      0      0
Aborted_connects                              0      0      0
Binlog_cache_disk_use                         0      0      0
Binlog_cache_use                              0      0      0
Bytes_received                             1167     35     35
Bytes_sent …

One of the things we've been working on in Drizzle is having automated performance regressions run when we push new code. Although the fully automated system isn't quite there yet, one of the pieces is, which is a Drizzle-supporting version of sysbench.

I've pushed the code to:

 lp:~drizzle-developers/sysbench/trunk

This new version of sysbench has a libdrizzle driver which can be used to run benchmarks against Drizzle, or, since libdrizzle can also talk to MySQL, to MySQL.

Getting started playing with it is pretty easy, just make sure you've installed a recent copy of libdrizzle first.

  bzr init-repo sysbench

  cd sysbench

  bzr branch  lp:~drizzle-developers/sysbench/trunk

  cd trunk

   ./autogen.sh

  ./configure

  make

  make install

From that point, you should be able …