beer planet

Updated: April 18th, 2008

• Tom Hanlon of MySQL presents
• monitoring tool basics
  • SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
  • SHOW GLOBAL STATUS
  • SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES
• basic tools
  • mysqladmin is provided with the server
    • mysqladmin -i 10 extended status: will repeat the same command every 10 seconds. Pipe through grep "and smoke it" (bad pun, hah hah)
    • -r: show only changed values
  • MySQL Administrator
• cacti
  • rrdtool based network graphing tool
  • uses snmp
  • PHP apache and MySQL based solution
  • MySQL plugins, download and install
  • "poller" gathers data and populates the graphs
  • someone offers munin as an alternative
    • not snmp based, its own agent is used
  • pros
    • cacti is fairly easy to configure
  • cons
    • could be CPU intensive with lots of machines (Perl polling seems to be the problem)
• zenoss
  • complete network monitoring tool
  • AJAX, integrated with Google Maps (if you don't know where the servers are, everyone laughs at this comment)
• innotop
  • monitoring innodb, complex output
  • developed by Baron Schwartz
• mytop
  • similar to Linux's top
  • filter connections on database/host being used
  • queries per sec
• mtstat-mysql
  • plugin for the system monitoring tool mtstat
  • mtstat provides functionality of vmstat and iostat tools to monitor system activity
• nagios
  • nagios is more of a notification tool, although it can do graphs
  • pain to set up, text config files, but still the most widely used tool, should be better in upcoming versions
  • NagiosQL is a front end tool for nagios administration (somebody from the audience pointed this out, that's completely new to me!)
  • I offer zabbix as an alternative
  • hyperic is another, apparently very easy to set up, with service autodiscovery
• MySQL Enterprise Monitor (not free)
  • graphs, monitoring, GUI
  • built by MySQL folks themselves
  • agent based
  • well organized
• webyog, sqlyog, monyog, mon, heartbeat, moodss, fiveruns are added by the audience members

Updated: March 26th, 2008

April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, most importantly, LinuxQuestions.org, I am now in possession of a 3-day conference pass!! I'm incredibly excited that I will be able to attend and finally meet many geniuses, including the ones mentioned on my Must-Know People In The MySQL Field page. I've never won anything worth over 50 cents before. As a funny side note, there were 4 pages of replies to the raffle post, 90% of them saying that they could not attend (mostly due to living in other countries), so in reality only 2-3 people out of everyone could actually attend. I like those odds.

Here is a link to the oh so colorful conference schedule. I'm particularly interested in this short list of highly exciting subjects:

April 15th

• State of MySQL - the keynote by Mårten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL).
• Performance Guide for MySQL Cluster - parallel query processing guide perhaps?
• Lessons Learned in Building a Highly Scalable MySQL Database - definitely need more lessons.
• Big Bird (Scaling Twitter) - should be fun, considering I heard twitter was started in ruby on rails and had major problems scaling out.
• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and New Features - an update would be nice, kthx.
• Dramatically Improving MySQL Database Performance in Data Warehouse Applications - more lessons!
• Investigating Innodb Scalability Limits by Peter Zaitsev from MySQL Performance Blog!
• Disaster is Inevitable—Are You Prepared? by Farhan Mashraqi from Fotolog.
• Mitigating Replication Latency in a Distributed Application Environment - I need to get rid of these constant replication lags already, for the love of god!

April 16th

• Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL - tasty MySQL bench goodies? Sign me up.
• Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System - sharding, disk spanning? Whatever this will be, I'm all ears.
• Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design - I'm very interested in this new, very promising future replacement engine for MyISAM.
• Astronomy, Petabytes, and MySQL - sounds like fun. I liked astronomy… I think.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part I) - more tools, invaluable.
• Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade (Part II) - even more? Tool overload for today.

April 17th

• A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database - by Jeff Rothschild from Facebook.com, sounds like something to wake me up in the morning.
• Stored Routines: Tips, Tricks, and Solutions
• MySQL Proxy, the Friendly Man in the Middle - probably one of the most interesting things in development right now.
• Sphinx: High Performance Full Text Search for MySQL
• Helping InnoDB Scale on Servers with Many CPU Cores and Disks - more scaling, always good.
• MySQL Hidden Treasures - man, how do I combine 3 sessions that go on at the same time?
• Top 20 DB Design Tips Every Architect Needs to Know
• Partitioned mySQL and …. realtime - by Dathan Pattishall from Flickr.
• Deadly Sins Using MySQL and PHP - by Arjen Lentz

April 18th

• temporarily unload all the information gathered in the previous 3 days and drown in beer

Excitement is in the air. Can you FEEL IT?