Since starting the innotop and mysqltoolkit projects on Sourceforge, I have learned a lot about how to use source control more effectively -- especially how branching and tagging can be used. Still, I have limited experience. I want to package all the tools in MySQL Toolkit together and release them in one archive, but I don't know the best way to do it; every idea seems to have drawbacks. Read on for the details, and if you have suggestions, would you please leave comments for me?

MySQL Table Checksum 1.1.6 enhances chunking, adds features and fixes bugs. The chunking functionality is where I continue to put most of my effort. This release's behavior is incompatible with the last release, and it will probably change again in the future.

Thanks to everyone who has been helping me chase down bugs, including one user who sent me a major patch! It's a great feeling to get a patch.

This is a review of Webyog's MONyog MySQL monitoring tool. The product is still in beta and has some rough edges, but holds promise. Its design includes some interesting architectural decisions I think will help distinguish it from MySQL's own Monitoring and Advisory Service.

I've spent my spare time the last few weekends helping a non-profit called Fast Forward here in the Columbia, SC area. I don't post this here to blow my own horn but rather to point out the need many non-profit organizations have for quality IT support. Most non-profits operate on a limited budget meaning they take help where they can get it. Often times there just isn't money left in the budget for a services contract, etc., even for an organization like Fast Forward.

This is where knowledgeable folks can really make a difference. I know the usual excuse: after spending all week looking at a computer screen, the last thing anyone wants to do is spend the weekend working on computers. I've been there, so I understand that feeling completely. However, I have to say that the time I've spent working at Fast Forward has been personally rewarding. There's a sense of accomplishment …

This release of MySQL Table Sync adds the ability to sync only part of a table, adds minor new functionality, and fixes a bug that could crash the tool.

MySQL Table Checksum 1.1.5 adds a some useful features and fixes a couple of bugs. Now you can checksum tables in chunks, and there is an option to pause between chunks as well. This has already helped me recover a very large table that got out of sync on the slaves, and many of you have also requested this feature.

A few people have asked me how fast MySQL Table Checksum is. As with so many other things, it depends. This article shows how long it takes to checksum real data on a production server I help manage, which might give you a rough idea of how long it'll take on your servers.

I've written before about how to make MySQL replication reliable. One thing I think you need to do to make statement-based replication reliable is eliminate temporary tables. I found an elegant way to replace temporary tables with real tables in the systems I maintain. This article explains how.

If you've used the UNIX find command for more than a trivial find-and-print, you know how powerful it is; it's almost a miniature programming environment to find and manipulate files and directories. What if you could do the same thing with MySQL tables and databases? That was the inspiration for writing this tool. I was about to write several other tools to do some MySQL administrative jobs when I realized I could generalize and make something much more useful and powerful.

MySQL Table Checksum 1.1.0 adds many improvements, but the most important is a new way to ensure slaves have the same data as their master. Instead of checksumming the slave and the master, it can now insert the checksum results directly on the master via an INSERT.. SELECT statement. This statement will replicate to the slave, where a simple query can find tables that differ from the master. This makes a consistent, lock-free checksum trivially easy.

There are also many other feature improvements and bug fixes, compatibility with MySQL 3.23.2 through 6.0-alpha, and finally I've gotten the documentation finished to my satisfaction.