It's been a while since I've written about progress on the book. I actually stopped working on it as much at the beginning of the month, because on October 31(st) I managed to finish a first draft of the last big chapter! Now I'm back to full-time work at my employer, and I'm working on the book in the evenings and weekends only. Read on for details of what I've been working on and what's next in the pipeline.

The 1.5.2 release of innotop contained two bugs, one very minor. The other was a crash because of the new functionality that aggregates results across many connections. I fixed them and released version 1.6.0, which I consider stable and ready for everyone to use. (My version naming convention for innotop is that even-numbered minor versions are for production use; odd-numbered, such as 1.5.2, are the development branch. That's why I release them under the innotop-devel package).

Your comments are welcome for the 1.8 roadmap.

I created MySQL Table Checksum because I was certain replication slaves were slowly drifting out of sync with their masters, and there was no way to prove it. Once I could prove it, I was able to show that replication gets out of sync for lots of people, lots of times. (If you really want to hear war stories, you should probably talk to one of the MySQL support staff or consulting team members; I'm sure they see this a lot more than I do).

I finally figured out what was causing one of my most persistent and annoying out-of-sync scenarios. It turns out to be nothing earth-shaking; it's just an easy-to-overlook limitation of statement-based replication. You could call it a bug, but as far as I can see, there's no way to fix it with statement-based replication. (I'd love to be proven wrong). Read on for the details.

Yep, it's true. "MySQL Toolkit" technically infringes on MySQL's trademark. I haven't been given a mandate or cease-and-desist order or anything, but as Marten Mickos (MySQL's CEO) told me, anything that starts with the word "MySQL" sounds like it comes from the company, and this project doesn't come from MySQL.

Suggestions are welcome. I'm totally uninspired. "Toolkit" was the best I could do when I named the project to begin with.

Thanks to a patch Dane Miller submitted, MySQL Heartbeat can now be used to monitor Slony-I replication lag for PostgreSQL. It works identically: it updates a record on the master and looks for it on the slave. You just have to specify the database driver on the command-line:

mysql-heartbeat [options] --dbidriver=Pg

Most of the tools in the MySQL Toolkit are very MySQL-specific. This one just happened to be an exception, and I'm happy it's useful for more than the original purpose.

Si Chen wrote recently about the growth limits of open-source projects. He points out that as a project becomes larger, it gets harder to maintain. I can only agree. As the MySQL Toolkit project has grown, it's become significantly more work to maintain, document, and enhance.

One of the enhancements I added to MySQL Archiver in the recent release was listed innocently in the changelog as "Destination plugins can now rewrite the INSERT statement." Not very exciting or informative, huh? Keep reading.

This release fixes some minor bugs. It also adds a few major new features to several of the tools. The command-line option and help functionality, as well as several other pieces of common functionality, has been replaced with common modules that have a test suite. This is the first step towards a gradual rewrite to replace untested 'script' code with tested, maintainable code.

A little while ago I offered to take time off work and improve MySQL Table Sync. I've gotten a very positive response to that, with several organizations offering to contribute to the bounty, so I'll go ahead and commit to doing this. Read on for the details.

Last week I wrote about my efforts to measure MySQL's replication speed precisely. The most important ingredient in that recipe was the user-defined function to get the system time with microsecond precision. This post is about that function, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to write.