MySQL Troubleshooting

Acknowledgments

I want to say thank you to the people without whose help this book couldn’t happen.

For a start, this includes my editor, Andy Oram, who did a great job making my English readable and who showed me gaps and places where I had not described information in enough detail. He also gave me insight into how prepared my readers would be, prompting me to add explanations for beginners and to remove trivial things known by everyone.

I also want to thank the whole MySQL Support Team. These folks share their expertise and support with every member of the team, and I learned a lot from them. I won’t put names here, because I want to say “thank you” to all of the people with whom I’ve worked since joining in 2006, even those who have left and moved to server development or another company.

Thanks to Charles Bell, who helped me to start this book. He also did a review of the book and suggested a lot of improvements. Charles works in the MySQL Replication and Backup Team at Oracle and is the author of two books about MySQL. Therefore, his suggestions, both for content and style, were very helpful.

I would also like to thank the people who reviewed the book:

• Shane Bester, my colleague from the MySQL Support Group, who reviewed the part devoted to his Gypsy program and suggested how to improve the example.

• Alexander (Salle) Keremedarski, who reviewed the whole book and sent me a lot of great suggestions. Salle has provided MySQL support since its very early days, starting in the MySQL Support Team and now at SkySQL as Director of EMEA Support. His knowledge of common user misunderstandings helped me to find places where I explained things in too little detail, so that a troubleshooting situation could be read as a best practice when actually it is not.

• Tonci Grgin, who reviewed the parts about MySQL Connectors and suggested additions, explaining their behavior. Tonci used to work in the same group as me and now works in the MySQL Connectors Team. He is the first person I would ask about anything related to MySQL Connectors.

• Sinisa Milivojevic, who reviewed Chapters 3 and 4 and parts about the MyISAM check and repairing tools. Sinisa is another reviewer who has worked in MySQL Support since the very beginning. He was employee #2 in MySQL and still works in the MySQL Support Team at Oracle. His huge experience is fantastic, and one might even think he knows every little detail about the MySQL server. Sinisa gave me insights on some of the topics I discuss and suggested short but very significant improvements.

• Valeriy Kravchuk, who reviewed Chapters 2 and 4 and the section InnoDB Monitors. He also works in the MySQL Support Team. Valeriy found many deficiencies in the chapters he reviewed. His criticism forced me to improve these chapters, although there is always room for development.

• Mark Callaghan, who runs database servers at Facebook, reviewed the whole book. Mark suggested that I put more examples and further explanation in places that were not clear. He also suggested examples for Chapter 4 and pointed me to places where my suggestions can be wrong for certain installations, prompting me to explain both situations: when the original suggestions fit and when they don’t. Thanks to Mark, I added more details about these arguable topics.

• Alexey Kopytov also reviewed the whole book. He is the author of the SysBench utility (which I describe in this book), worked in MySQL Development, and now works at Percona. Alexey sent me improvements for the SysBench part.

• Dimitri (dim) Kravtchuk, Principal Benchmark Engineer at Oracle, reviewed the whole book as well. He is also the author of the dim_STAT monitoring solution I describe in this book, the db_STRESS database benchmarking kit, and a famous blog where he posts articles about InnoDB performance and MySQL benchmarks. He suggested several improvements to sections where I describe InnoDB, Performance Schema, and hardware impacts.

Finally, thanks to my family:

• My mother, Yulia Ivanovna Ivanova, who showed me how fun engineering can be.

• My parents-in-law, Valentina Alekseevna Lasunova and Nikolay Nikolayevich Lasunov, who always helped us when we needed it.

• And last but not least, my husband, Sergey Lasunov, who supported me in all my initiatives.