MySQL Troubleshooting

Maintenance Tools

The tools in this section are useful in a day-to-day DBA job, not just when trouble occurs. If you use them regularly, you can avoid most troublesome situations. That’s why I’m describing them here: one of my reasons for writing this book was to help you have trouble-free MySQL installations.

These tools have great user guides as well as reference manuals, so I’ll just introduce them without details.

Tools from the MySQL distribution

MySQL comes with set of tools that you can find in the bin directory of the MySQL installation. Become acquainted with them. They are described in the section of the MySQL Reference Manual about MySQL programs.

Percona Toolkit

This toolkit, available from Percona, was put together from the Aspersa and Maatkit distributions. It contains a lot of powerful instruments to control the server and its tables.

MySQL WB Utilities

Although they are part of the MySQL Workbench installation, these run from the command line. They are independent from MySQL Workbench and can be run on platforms that don’t run MySQL Workbench. The tools are written in the Python language. They work mostly with database structure, not with data, and can help automate processes such as replication setup and grant migration.

Monitoring tools

It is very important to monitor your system for statistics related to its day-to-day operation. Here I describe two tools that can help you monitor a MySQL installation:

MySQL Enterprise Manager

The MySQL team provides MySQL Enterprise ...