System administrators familiar with the Linux operating system use the tools in the 'procps' toolset all the time. Tools which read from /proc include top, iostat, vmstat, sar and others. The files in /proc contain useful information about the performance of the system. Most of the files are documented in the Linux kernel documentation. You can also check man 5 proc.

Most performance monitoring tools invoke other tools like iostat to collect performance information instead of reading from the /proc filesytem itself. This begs the question, what can you do if you don't have access to those tools? Perhaps you are using a hosted Linux database and have no access to the underlying shell to execute tools like iostat or top? How could you gather information about the performance of the actual system without being allowed to run the tools?
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I'm happy to announce that my talk "Making MySQL administration a breeze - a look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" has been accepted for this year's edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, which will take place on April 12-15, 2010. The session is currently scheduled for Wednesday 14th, 10:50 in Ballroom E.

My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual …

I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation …

Elliot offers $2bn for Novell. OSI refutes IIPA’s view on open source. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell confirmed a $2bn purchase offer from Elliot Associates. Interesting perspectives on Elliot’s offer for Novell from Linuxquestions, Andy Updegrove, and Matt Asay.

# The OSI categorically rejected the …

CMake is a cross-platform, open-source build system, maintained by Kitware, Inc.

From the CMake.org home page:

CMake is a family of tools designed to build, test and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files. CMake generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.

It has been used for building the MySQL Server on Windows since MySQL 5.0 – the initial CMake build support was added in August 2006.

For …

I spend the last couple days playing with InnoDB page compression on the latest Percona build.

I’m pretty happy so far with Percona and the latest InnoDB changes.

Compression wasn’t living up to my expectations though.

I think the biggest problem is that the compression can only use one core in replication and ALTER TABLE statements.

We have an 80GB database that was running on 96GB boxes filled with RAM.

I wanted to try to run this on much smaller instances (32GB-48GB boxes) by compressing the database.

Unfortunately, after 24 hours of running an ALTER TABLE which would only use one core per table, the SQL replication thread went to 100% and started falling behind fast.

I think what might be happening is that the InnoDB page buffer is full because it can’t write to the disk fast enough which causes the insert thread to force compression of the pages in the foreground.

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Novell’s Q1. The future of OpenSolaris. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Novell reported Linux platform revenue of $37.5m in Q1, up 6.4%.

# Internet.com reported that Novell’s Linux business broke even as Microsoft deal revenues fade.

# As the H reported Oracle exec Dan Roberts confirmed that OpenSolaris has a future at Oracle.

# Citrix acquired Paglo, launched GoToManage service.

# StatusNet …

There’s been a fair amount of attention – both positive and negative – on dual licensing in recent weeks. A few days ago Brian Aker wrote: “The fact is, there are few, and growing fewer, opportunities to make money on dual licensing.”

It is a sweeping statement, but one that is worth further consideration, especially since, as Stephen O’Grady noted it is directly contradicted by Gartner’s prediction that: “By 2012, at least 70% of the revenue from commercial OSS will come from vendor-centric projects with dual-license business models.”

Success?

I remember reading this prediction back in December but dismissing it as …

Just a quick notice to let everyone know that there is a new version of Kontrollkit available. There are two new scripts included as well as some good updates to the my.cnf files. You can download the new version here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads kt-mysql-systemcheck – generates a report for point-in-time system status that is useful for troubleshooting MySQL [...]

This is a simple matter with a simple solution that might help someone save time and confusion. Emacs wasn’t coloring my comments correctly so I went ahead and had it change them to red-italic. If you are having similar issues you can drop the following into your home directory’s .emacs file. Enjoy. Keep in mind that if you are using emacs in a terminal session as opposed to the X-server gui then you will not see the italics.


(global-font-lock-mode 1)
(custom-set-variables
'(gud-gdb-command-name "gdb --annotate=1")
'(large-file-warning-threshold nil))
(custom-set-faces
'(font-lock-comment-face ((((class color) (background light)) (:foreground "red" :slant italic)))))