Xaprb

It’s been a while since I’ve sent any news about the MySQL Cacti Templates project I started a while ago. Here’s what’s new:

• First of all, it’s not just MySQL templates anymore. It’s a generic framework and tools for creating templates, and I’ve written templates for Apache, Memcached, etc. I just haven’t publicized it yet.
• Second, there’s a mailing list, http://groups.google.com/group/better-cacti-templates You see it’s called “better cacti templates” which is what I ought to have called the project to begin with :-) I hope you’ll use the mailing list instead of emailing me directly, for all the usual reasons.
• There are some open issues I cannot reproduce. I believe they’re problems, but I can’t solve them. Some of them make no sense to me; I don’t know why others are seeing behavior I’m not. However these seem to be problems with Cacti, not problems with the templates. Anyone who wants commit access is welcomed to ask for it.
• Some people have been asking about Spine. I haven’t used it and none of my customers has asked me about it, so the short answer is — if you want Spine support, don’t wait for it to happen for free; either contribute it yourself or pay someone (me?) to do it.

Peter Gulutzan and Mark Leith have both written about the new PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in MySQL. I’ve read through the worklog, or most of it — there were some spots where Firefox seemed to start overlaying parts with other parts, quite weird. But anyway I’ve read as much as I can.

Obviously many people have been putting a ton of thought into this for years, and I can’t pretend to judge their work in a single sitting. But I have opinions nevertheless.

If the implementation turns out to be as good as the initial swing at it looks, this is a great development. This is the way things should be done — this is, finally, the level of detail of instrumentation other databases have. There’s a lot of complexity; it is a large worklog and I can’t say whether it’s complete or something is put in the wrong place or will turn out to be not quite what’s needed; that’s where I stop trying to form an opinion. But overall, this is just a great development.

A few questions and comments, though.

• Why has this not been public? You put four years of work into this without any community input? What a shame.
• Mark says “There’s no stats for InnoDB yet, though I can’t see that lasting for long.” I can. Why don’t you see InnoDB being slow to add support for it?
• What version is this intended for? 6.x is kind of vague after four years of work.
• Information by itself is no use unless you can act on it. I predict that a lot of neglected bug reports will get revisited if this information can be brought to bear on it. I also predict that if implemented fully, this will show people where the hot spots in their server are; and yet they’ll be unable to fix them.

So far this year I’ve been totally silent about the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. In the past I’ve been a vocal advocate of going to the conference and sending your employees to the conference. So my silence was conspicuous to me, if not to you. I’ve always considered myself a strong MySQL supporter and I still do.

Why wasn’t I telling people to go to this year’s conference? Simple: I can’t in good conscience tell people to attend an event from which I’ve been excluded (oh, the irony). So I stayed quiet while MySQL employees told people to read my article about how to get a session accepted to the MySQL conference. More irony. It is not my way to remain silent, but circumstances demanded it.

But now I’m back! My colleagues and I will be there, and now I’m advocating for your attendance there, as ever. You should come to the conference, and you should consider attending the Percona Performance Conference at the same time so you can learn about more than just MySQL (and see the “missing sessions” that weren’t accepted).

And for the record, I never pressured anyone to accept my sessions. I just stayed silent. That’s what polite people do when they’re not on the guest list: they just find another party.