Pythian Group

Oracle Open World 2009 is just few weeks away and I firmed up my presentation schedule now. I will present three “normal” presentations and couple unconference sessions. I’m arriving in San Francisco few days before the conference (7th of October) get to the Oracle ACE Directors briefing so I’ll spend the first few day in Redwood Shores and then off to Moscone Center.

Before I get to the schedule, if you want to catch up with me during OOW — tweet me @alexgorbachev. You are likely to see me in the OTN Lounge or in “The Cave” if you know what I’m talking about.

Here is a quick summary of my presentations:

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I have just released a new version of the MySQL plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager — MySQL plug-in 1.1.1. This is a long overdue bug fix release.

There are no new features implemented (we have another branch in development) but just fixed number of fairly annoying bugs that I was finally able to reproduce.

The download link is on the plug-in’s home page where you can also find a data-sheet and installation guide.

Here are the changes in the 1.1.1 release:

• Tested with Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g Release 5 (10.2.0.5)
• Fixed the bug with connections not closed properly
• Fixed bug that caused collection to hang and time-out (Net::MySQL bug — not recognizing a final packet in result-set)
• Fixed bug that caused collection processes to spin on CPU (Net::MySQL bug when zero length packet returned from the socket — very weird why it happens)
• Fixed few bugs in Commands and Executions report – graphs produced errors from time to time
• Removed columns Compression and Tc_log_% in Others metric
• Changed metric Opened_tables into ratio per second

I have tested it on Linux and Windows with MySQL 5.0 and 5.1. Please do post here in the comments to confirm that it works on your release and provide the following info:

• Oracle Grid Control Server (OMS) version
• Oracle Agent version
• Operating Sysytem and version
• MySQL version and the details of the build
• Do you monitor MySQL instance running locally (on the same host as Oracle Agent) or remotely

This will help the whole community and confirm that there are no platform/version specific issues. I will take care of summarizing your comments — don’t be afraid to duplicate the info. Thanks!

Any issues please report here as usual.

In case you are attending Oracle Open World 2008, the biggest Oracle conference in the world, and interested in either (or both) MySQL or Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility — I posted a proposal for a new presentation:

Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager by Example — Creating MySQL Management Plug-In

I’ve started looking into Oracle extensibility several years ago and since then I’ve seen lots of improvements in Extensibility Guide and many new plug-ins have seen the light of the day. However, creating a new plug-in is still considered to be something special and not available to mere mortals.
In this presentation we will see how easy it is to create a new plug-in. What are the steps and the method to follow. As an example we will work with MySQL Management Plug-in that I have recently released to public.
This session includes a live demo.

If you are interested, you may as well vote for it. If there are enough interested people, Oracle might select it for the conference.

If neither this nor my previous submission make it, well, I’ll go there anyway to have some fun and meet good old and, hopefully, new friends.

Please note: This plug-in has been created and is now available for download:

MySQL Plugin for Grid Control

It’s been a while since the MySQL Management Plug-in 0.42 was released. Since then, I quietly updated it to version 1.0. The changes were very few; the biggest news was that the plug-in was certified by Oracle and added to OTN Oracle 10g Grid Control Extensions Exchange (see at the bottom).

I think the next version is due, as a few people have come back to me with some issues. The biggest was compatibility with Windows. Since I used the command line MySQL client, *nix and Windows shell incompatibilities were a major headache to solve, and I still couldn’t make it work reliably. I wanted to use DBI and DBD:MySQL, but it required installing and compiling Perl packages, which makes the deployment process very inconvenient.

Finally, I found a solution — Net::MySQL is a native Perl implementation of the MySQL client. I had to fix some bugs and add a few improvements to it, and I hope to get the author to re-introduce them back to the new CPAN distribution. Net::MySQL is dependent on IO::Socket, which is a core module that comes with the standard Perl distributed with the Oracle Management Agent.

Version 1.1 turned out to be a major rewrite for the Perl collection scripts and the net result is that compatibility across platforms is greatly improved. I have successfully tested the new version on Linux and Windows Agent hosts.

So what’s new in version 1.1 compared to 0.42?

• certified by Oracle; see OTN Extensions Exchange
• no MySQL client is required on Agent hosts. The Perl Net::MySQL package is distributed with the plug-in
• fully compatible with Windows
• MySQL client path property removed
• added support for local connection using Unix sockets
• added connection error message when target is down — can be seen in Availability History
• commands statistics skips collection for never-executed commands so less data is collected; thus, I could safely increased default collection frequency; command names are formated better
• changed default collection frequency for network, joins and sort statistics
• % command executions are collected right now — the “Questions” statistic didn’t match the total of all Com_ statistics.
• metric “Processes by Action” now excludes the plug-in’s own connection which was always adding one to “Query”
• a few minor typos fixed

Downloads, requirements, and installation instructions — as well as the datasheet — are available at the MySQL Plug-in for Oracle Grid Control home page.

You can also go directly to the plug-in download page by clicking here:

MySQL Plugin for Grid Control

Hello everyone,

Reading PlanetMySQL today, I discovered that Alex Gorbachev’s announcement that he has released the first public beta of his Oracle Grid Control plugin for MySQL was not aggregated! This is probably because Alex is primarily working on our Oracle space and so his feed isn’t on planet.

This plugin has been under development since 2006 and this is a major achievement.

Knowing that my feed is aggregated, and not willing to let this news and this amazing work go unnoticed by the MySQL community during the conference (I am at MySQLConf listening to Amazon.com’s CTO speak right now!)

In any event, if you missed them inline up there, here’s a link to Alex’s announcement with some impressive screenshots, and here’s a link to the product’s home page.

You can also go directly to the product download page by clicking here:

MySQL Plugin for Grid Control

And check out the very positive comments from the first testers already on the announcement post.

Congratulations and thanks, Alex!

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

Further update:Oracle has certified this plug-in as the official MySQL plug-in for Oracle Grid Control

To go directly to the download page, click below:

MySQL Plugin for Grid Control

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

Read the rest of this entry . . .