It has finally happened! The first public release of the MySQL plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is out.

It’s been a while since I first started to work on this, first as part of the Grid Control Extensibility article that I wrote for IOUG SELECT Magazine in 2006 (thanks to John Kanagaraj for encouraging me to write it), and then later as part of a demo for my presentations. I was already working at Pythian and was considering further developing my example and releasing it.

In the last few months, more and more people showed interest in the potential plug-in, and even few guys from Oracle contacted me independently of each other with their own reasons to have a MySQL plug-in available. This interest accelerated the fermentation of thoughts in my brain, and I got down to work. Pythian generously sponsored my development time.

I’ve called this first release beta but as I didn’t do much testing, it should probably be called alpha. Having said that, it has been tested with MySQL 5.1 and 5.0, and it should also work with MySQL 4.1. I develop and use it with Oracle Management Agents running on the Linux platform, but I changed all the collection scripts to use the Perl that comes with the Oracle agent so it should run on Windows as well. It works quite stably for me, and I have verified it in several real-life environments.

I would probably take some more time before releasing it, but I really wanted to have the plug-in out before I leave for COLLABORATE 08 (should I also tell you the readiness level of my presentation?). I hope to get some feedback and first impressions from DBAs who try the plug-in. Bear in mind that this is the very first release — expect some rough edges. Please do report them here. We will probably set up a more structured set of pages, but for now leaving comments here is the way to go.

Here are the details. The first release version is 0.42 because that’s obviously the perfect number to start something good.

What’s implemented so far

Standard availability monitoring in Grid Control

Hundreds of statistics collected, organized in 19 categories

Four out-of-the-box reports to start with

Configuration management, including history and comparison

What versions of Grid Control are required?

My development environment has been recently upgraded to 10.2.0.4, but I’ve tried to keep it compatible with 10.2.0.3. At least, I keep the required version at 10.2.0.3 in the plug-in definition so you can try it. If you need to try it with an earlier release, let me know and I will try to package a version for you.

What’s coming? Lots! Assuming there is enough interest, here are just few planned enhancements:

1. Test and improve cross-platform compatibility (Unix/Linux/Windows)
2. Test and improve support for MySQL 4.1-6.0
3. Add more metrics collected, including space monitoring
4. Assign more appropriate out-of-the-box thresholds
5. Create more reports out-of-the-box
6. Add logfile monitoring
7. Rework configuration collection and categories
8. Add out-of-the-box policies
9. Add jobs support
10. Add support for slave replication monitoring
11. Add support for clusters
12. You name it!

I have created the homepage for the MySQL plug-in for Oracle Grid Control; there you can download this and all future versions.

Give it a go and let me know how it works for you.

Update: I’m currently working with Oracle development on certifying this plug-in.

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