There are many times when writing an application that single threaded database operations are simply too slow. In these cases it’s a matter of course that you’ll use multi-threading or forking to spawn secondary processes to handle the database actions. In this simple example for Python multi-threading you’ll see the how simple it is to improve the performance of your python app.

#!/usr/bin/python
## DATE: 2010-08-30
## AUTHOR: Matt Reid
## WEBSITE: http://themattreid.com
## LICENSE: BSD http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
## Copyright 2010-present Matt Reid

from __future__ import division
from socket import gethostname;
import threading
import sys
import os
import MySQLdb

class threader(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self,method):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.tx =
        self.method = method
    def run(self):
        run_insert()

def run_insert():
    sql = "INSERT INTO table (`id`,`A`,`B`,`C`) VALUES …

If you need to work with LVM in your scripts but haven’t found a good method to access details about Logical Volume Groups, here’s a simple Python script that will print the details about any volumes on your system. This could be useful for writing a partition check script for your MySQL data directory (if you’re not using a standard monitoring system like Nagios).

import sys
import os
import commands
import subprocess
import select

def lvm():
    print ""
    LVM_PATH = "/sbin"
    LVM_BIN = os.path.join(LVM_PATH, 'lvm')
    argv = list()
    argv.append(LVM_BIN)
    argv.append("lvs")
    argv.append("--nosuffix")
    argv.append("--noheadings")
    argv.append("--units")
    argv.append("b")
    argv.append("--separator")
    argv.append(";")
    argv.append("-o")
    argv.append("lv_name,vg_name,lv_size")

    process = subprocess.Popen(argv, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    output = ""
    out = process.stdout.readline()
    output += out
    lines = …

Here’s a simple answer to a simple question. “How do I run a backup of MySQL to another machine without writing to the local server’s filesystem?” – this is especially useful if you are running out of space on the local server and cannot write a temporary file to the filesystem during backups.

Method one – this writes a remote file.
mysqldump [options] [db_name|--all-databases]| gzip -c | ssh user@host.com "cat > /path/to/new/file.sql.gz"

Method two – this writes directly into a remote mysql server
mysqldump [options] [db_name|--all-databases]| mysql --host=[remote host] –user=root –password=[pass] [db_name]

If you’re using the new Arthemia theme for WordPress you might notice that there are two areas of the theme that can have articles promoted to; namely Headline and Featured sections. This is controlled by category association. Basically you have a post and if you want it in the Headline area of the theme you attach the category “headline” to it, similarly for the featured section. Now, let’s say you don’t want to manually change this all the time since it can be time consuming to promote posts to those categories if you want rotating content.

Here’s a simple solution. In this bash script I connect to MySQL and remove the current associations from posts and then randomly choose posts to be promoted to the Headline and Featured categories. This can be modified for other ideas you might have involving categories/posts/randomized …

If you own a Nokia N900 cellular device you might be interested in the ability to control all of your IM accounts from the command line. For those that do not know, the N900 runs Maemo Linux and is capable of running MySQL embedded if you so choose. Here’s a quick script I wrote to provide that functionality for IM accounts. It’s at the bottom of the page, called “im-connections”.

wiki: http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Mission_Control#Set_all_SIP_accounts_to_online_or_offline
pastebin: http://pastebin.com/qAC57E1N

Just a quick notice to let everyone know that there is a new version of Kontrollkit available. There are some required bug fixes to the formerly new python backup script and some Solaris compatible changes to the various my.cnf files. You can download the new version here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads, or here: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollkit/

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading “Python Testing: An easy and convenient approach to testing your python projects” from Packt Publishing. It’s been a quick read but a solid set of instructions on the different methods for the subject.

The book starts out very quickly with details about the various methods that are available, the means of automation for testing, and of course the environment you’d want to be in for working on the subjects that the book covers. It then, in the second chapter, moves into the guts of testing by describing the basics of doctest via syntax and some simple examples, and then moves on to a real world example via the AVL tree. It’s all very basic testing until chapter three where the author gets into unit testing, …

Quick note to let our users know that there was an XML tag closure error on the “alert_22″ subroutine in the “bin/kontroll-reporter-cli.pl” script. This does not affect the webapp portion of Kontrollbase – only reports generated via the command line reporter script. It is not a fatal error but will cause the XML file to […]

I’ve been wanting to write a backup script for a while now that does the following: reads the partition information for the directory that you are backing up into and computes the used/available/percentage-available space. Then it reads the total data size from the MySQL tables and ensures that you have enough space on disk (for [...]

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 [...]