This is one of many perl script tools from Percona that makes life easier administrating, monitoring and testing mysql, this one solves the need to alter a table (adding a key, column, partitioning, etc…) on a production system that can’t be taken down. Many of the current Percona tools came from maatkit, developed by Baron [...]

What is Ansible?

Ansible is a configuration management and deployment system, like Puppet, Capistrano, Fabric, and Chef. Its aim is to be radically simple and let you use your existing scripts to help with cluster configuration and software deployment whenever possible. Here are the ways that Ansible differentiates itself.

Simplicity

Ansible does not include a client/server architecture with pull-based clients (although in more recent versions, it does include pull-based configuration and deployment). Rather, it uses pre-existing network infrastructure: SSH. Every company has SSH installed on their cluster servers, and Ansible simply rides on top of this infrastructure to get the code and configuration out to the nodes.

Language Agnostic

You can write modules for Ansible in …

A set of internet tools, is available at otala.net/tools.shtml

• Traceroute
• Whois & JWhois
• NSLookup
• Ping
• DNSWalk
• NetStat
• ENUM (e164.org phone number lookup)

More to come, as (if/when) I get time -- suggestions welcome

Everyone has their preferred method of communication, which they tend to overuse at the cost of other methods. At MySQL AB, email was preferred in many situations where picking up the phone would have saved loads of work, frustration and distractions. SkySQL Ab as a company is equally distributed across continents and time zones. Not surprisingly, we have inherited some of MySQL's bad habits, and created a set of new habits, good and bad. The purpose of this write-up is to take a step back and reflect upon which tool fits which purpose, focusing on a virtual company with colleagues spanning many time zones.

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Do you rely on pt-diskstats from Percona Toolkit instead of the standard iostat a lot? There appears to be a nasty bug in pt-diskstats 2.1, which makes it produce bad results.

I noticed some of the numbers I was getting weren’t right, so I tried running iostat and two different releases of pt-diskstat side by side. Here’s what I got:

I can understand the slight differences between the lines in iostat and pt-diskstats 2.0 as they probably weren’t reading /proc/diskstats contents in the same moments, so the values they were seeing could be a bit different. However both lines practically show the same thing.

On the other hand, the line based on the pt-diskstats 2.1 output looks completely different. It seems like maybe the script returns some kind of averages rather than per second deltas. I filed a …

1. Percona Toolkit
Percona Toolkit (aka Maatkit and Aspersa) is must have collection of advanced command-line tools which helps in performing tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

2. Mydumper
Mydumper is a high-performance multi-threaded backup/restore tool for MySQL. It’s up to 10x faster compared to mysqldump, can take consistent snapshots and provides File compression on-the-fly. Though it’s still under active development but is well tested/used in production on some large installations.

3. MySQL Master HA
This tool helps to maintain your Master-Slave replication setup. A primary objective is automating master fail-over and slave …

This week I was given the task of repopulating our entire primary database cluster.  This was due to an alter that had to be performed on our largest table.  It was easiest to run it on one host and populate the dataset from that host everywhere.

I recalled a while back reading a blog post from Tumblr about how to chain a copy to multiple hosts using a combination of nc, tar, and pigz.  I used this, with a few other things to greatly speed up our repopulation process.  As I was repopulating production servers, I did a combination of raw data copy and xtrabackup streams across our servers, depending on the position in our replication setup.

For a normal straight copy, here’s what I did:

On the last host, configure netcat to listen and then pipe the output through pigz and tar to …

Taxonomy of Database Tools

In the MySQL ecosphere there is an ecosystem of tools.  Like real-world ecosystems, the “creatures” in the MySQL tools ecosystem can be classified and organized by a taxonomy.  There are already multiple taxonomies of software bugs (e.g. A Taxonomy of Bugs), but as far as I know this is the first Taxonomy of Database Tools.  A taxonomy of database tools serves useful purposes, as discussed in the previously linked page.  For me, the most useful purpose is the high-level ecosystem view which I use to compare MySQL tools to  …

I’m at Hotsos Symposium this week, and it suddenly occurred to me that a lot of Oracle DBAs who are beginning to manage MySQL servers might have some things to share with others in a similar role shift:

• Familiar, comfortable tools and techniques, or capabilities of the Oracle Database, that you miss in MySQL
• Equivalents or replacements for the aforementioned

Do you have anything to share with your fellow DBAs going through ODT (Oracle Delerium Tremens)? Do you have any wishes that you haven’t satisfied yet? Post in the comments and let’s see if we can create a sort of forum for sharing and/or a wishlist in case someone gets an urge to fill in a missing piece!

Further Reading:

• Making …

Here are the lists of useful tools in comparing database snapshots, files and even folders.

1. dbForge Studio - It is a complete suite for all your needs in managing all your MySQL databases. This software can analyze your data and compare the differences and quickly create the diff statement ready to be executed. dbForge also offers Free edition the dbforge Studio for MySQL Express but of course with limited functionality

Features | Download

• Administration and Maintenance
• Backup
• Data Analysis
• Data Comparison
• Data Editor
• Database Explorer
• Debugger
• Exporting and Importing Data
• MySQL Connectivity
…