Book Image

Instant InnoDB

By : Matt Reid
Book Image

Instant InnoDB

By: Matt Reid

Overview of this book

<p>InnoDB, the default storage engine for MySQL, is one of the most robust and commonly used in the world today. It can, however, be initially daunting to learn how to start implementing its features, and it can pose unique problems to the beginner user. This guide is written to address these problems.</p> <p>"Instant InnoDB" addresses everything you need to know for the installation, configuration, load testing, analysis, and long term support of an InnoDB based database environment. If you've ever wanted to learn more about InnoDB but didn't want to sit down with a formidably large or dry read, then the Instant InnoDB&nbsp; is your ideal companion.</p> <p>"Instant InnoDB" guides you expertly through the initial setup and system requirements for getting up and running with a simple environment that can be used for the development and testing of the InnoDB engine.<br /><br />After an in-depth look at basic and advanced configuration settings we delve into the internals of InnoDB that allow it to handle Multi-Version Concurrency Control and ACID transaction compliance. We will then dig deeper into advanced topics, such as memory buffer tuning methods and transaction log file handling. We'll then cover typical approaches and solutions to monitoring the database and reporting on operational states.</p> <p>By the end of the Instant InnoDB , we will have covered the common approaches to troubleshooting and error handling, as well as providing you with solutions to the most common architectural, administrative, and engineering related situations that arise when working with the InnoDB database engine.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Open source system monitoring tools


Before we run any load tests we need to be able to collect system load metrics. These will be used to test the hypothesis and to monitor activity during the testing periods. Testing without usage statistic monitoring is equivalent to blind operation that prohibits objective reasoning. Useful tools for system resource monitoring are included with Linux and most BSD operating systems:

  • sar: This allows the administrator to collect, report, and save system activity information. This can be used in an interval collection state with many advanced options for resource monitoring. A number of supporting tools are available that generate graphs from sar output. Sar can be found in the sysstat package on most Linux systems.

  • top: This displays current active operating system tasks. If run without flags, it will only report tasks owned by the active user. Referencing the manual page will describe the numerous flags available to alter information that is displayed...