I haven’t really decided my schedule yet during the conference, but I thought I’d mention these sessions that look interesting to me.

I’m presenting a session on how to use Maatkit, which I think attendees will get a lot of benefit from.

• Tuesday
  • This is Not a Web App: The Evolution of a MySQL Deployment at Google (keynote). Mark Callaghan, need I say more?
  • MySQL and Search at Craigslist. Jeremy has gotten back into technical work after a career at Yahoo! that seemed to lead him away from his heart’s desire. I’d like to hear about the things he’s done, especially since I understand it involves replacing a lot of overloaded MySQL machines with a few underloaded Sphinx machines.
  …

If you’ve been holding out for that golden opportunity, now’s a great time to get involved in Maatkit.

Until now I haven’t really made a conscious effort to open-source the decision process and get people involved; Maatkit has been largely driven by so-called “real-world needs,” as perceived through my little lens on the world (and emails from the whole Percona team telling me when something’s wrong). I guess I am likely to remain some kind of benevolent dictator, because I created Maatkit and historically I’m the main hacker. But it doesn’t have to stay that way, and the project and users will be better off if it doesn’t.

So I’ve been trying to break out of the rut of just having some little email exchange with people using the tools, and bring things onto the …

I was just talking to someone who backs up their MySQL servers once a day with mysqldump, and I said in a catastrophe, you’re going to have to reload from a backup; that’s some amount of downtime, plus up to a day of lost data.

And they said “We can just promote a slave, we’ve done [...]

This is actually old news, but I never thought to file a bug report (until now) or say anything to anyone about it. If you use mysqldump to dump and restore a MySQL table that has INSERT triggers, you can get different data in your restored database than you had when you dumped. [...]

Sun has invited me to showcase Maatkit at the dot-org pavilion at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. At this time it’s really hard to say what I’ll be demoing! Development on Maatkit is accelerating and I don’t look for that to change, so who knows what we’ll have done by then. [...]

Last week I had to confront one of those situations where you can’t really tell what is going on with a piece of software, and the final conclusion would sound completely crazy if postulated as the initial hypothesis. The regular MySQL commands and utilities fall short in these cases, so I had to resort to the three tools reviewed in this article.

The problem we were diagnosing was this: at some point in time, a number of queries that use to take less than one minute to execute, started to take between five to 15 minutes. We needed to get an insight into what was going on inside the MySQL server.

MySQL Tuner

At some point in a long diagnosis process, MySQL’s SHOW [GLOBAL] VARIABLES and SHOW [GLOBAL] STATUS are nothing more than a long list of numbers. Going through a team mate’s notes on another issue, I came across MySQL Tuner. This is an …

Download Maatkit

The December release is here! There are some goodies in this release, but the major one is an initial version of mk-log-parser, a slow log analysis tool that is carefully designed (with lots of input from Percona consultants) to make slow log analysis as productive and easy as possible. It’s based on a [...]

Download Maatkit

The newest release of Maatkit contains mk-audit bug fixes, lots of new features for mk-table-checksum so you can check replication more frequently (see my earlier post about this), and more bug fixes for other tools.

Here’s the changelog:

Changelog for mk-audit:

2008-10-17: version 0.9.3

* mk-audit died if no /etc/*release file existed (issue 62). [...]

I just wrote about how Maatkit has gotten some new features for helping people make sure their slaves have an exact copy of the master’s data. This work was largely sponsored by one of Percona’s customers, whose name I have permission to mention: Vantage Media.

Thanks Vantage! Your sponsorship helps many people and businesses.

I have recently added some features to Maatkit’s mk-table-checksum tool that can make it easy to checksum the relevant parts of your data more frequently (i.e. continually, but not continuously). This in turn makes it possible for you to find out much sooner if a slave becomes different from its master, and then you [...]