Ronald Bradford
MySQL Expert

MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford shares valuable input in MySQL Performance Tuning, MySQL Scalability and general MySQL Help from his two decades of working with MySQL, Oracle, Ingres and development technologies.

Posts Tagged ‘query analysis’

SQL Analysis with MySQL Proxy – Part 2

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

As I outlined in Part 1 MySQL Proxy can be one tool for performing SQL analysis. The impact with any monitoring is the art of monitoring will affect the results, in this case the performance. I don’t recommend enabling this level of detailed monitoring in production, these techniques are designed for development, testing, and possibly stress testing.

This leads to the question, how do I monitor SQL in production? The simple answer to this question is, Sampling. Take a representative sample of your production system. The implementation of this depends on many factors including your programming technology stack, and your MySQL topology.

If for example you are using PHP, then defining MySQL proxy on a production system, and executing firewall rules to redirect incoming 3306 traffic to 4040 for a period of time, e.g. 2 seconds can provide a wealth of information as to what’s happening on the server now. I have used this very successfully in production as an information gathering an analysis tool. It is also reasonably easy to configure, execute and the impact on any failures for example are minimized due to the sampling time.

If you run a distributed environment with MySQL Slaves, or many application servers, you can also introduce sampling to a certain extent as these specific points, however like scaling options, it is key to be able to handle and process the write load accurately.

Another performance improvement is to move processing of the gathered information in MySQL proxy to a separate thread or process, removing this work from the thread execution path and therefore increasing the performance. I’m interested to explore the option of passing this information off to memcached or gearman and having MySQL proxy simply capture the packet information and distributing the output. I have yet to see how memcached and/or gearman integrate with the Lua/C bindings. If anybody has experience or knowledge I would be interested to know more.

It is interesting to know that Drizzle provides a plugin to send this level of logging information to gearman automatically.

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Posted in Databases, Drizzle, General, MySQL, MySQL Proxy, Open Source, Professional | No Comments »

SQL query analysis with MySQL Proxy

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Long before there was the official Query Analyzer (QUAN), a component of MySQL Enterprise, SQL analysis was possible using MySQL Proxy.

The following is an introduction to logging and query analysis with MySQL Proxy.

Get MySQL Proxy

You need to first download MySQL Proxy. In this example I am using the Linux RHEL5 64bit OS and Version 0.7.2

$ wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-Proxy/mysql-proxy-0.7.2-linux-rhel5-x86-64bit.tar.gz/from/http://mirror.trouble-free.net/mysql_mirror/
$ tar xvfz mysql-proxy-0.7.2-linux-rhel5-x86-64bit.tar.gz
$ ln -s mysql-proxy-0.7.2-linux-rhel5-x86-64bit mysql-proxy
$ export PATH=`pwd`/mysql-proxy/sbin:$PATH
$ mysql-proxy --help-all

Pre-requisites

MySQL Proxy uses TCP/IP, so it is important you connect via the actual hostname. You should first confirm this, as appropriate MySQL permissions may be necessary. For example:

$ mysql -h`hostname` -u -p

On confirmation this works, you can then connect directly to the proxy

$ mysql -h`hostname` -P4040 -u -p

Logging

$ cd mysql-proxy/share/doc/mysql-proxy/
$ wget -O log.lua http://ronaldbradford.com/mysql-dba/mysql-proxy/log.lua
$ mysql-proxy --proxy-lua-script=share/doc/mysql-proxy/log.lua &
$ tail -f mysql.log

This script is based on simple query logging which requires a modification to work in more current versions of MySQL proxy.

$ mysql -hhostname -P4040 -u -p
mysql>  SELECT host,user,password FROM mysql.user;
mysql>  SELECT table_schema,COUNT(*) FROM information_schema.tables GROUP BY table_schema;
mysql>  SELECT NOW(), SLEEP(3);
mysql>  EXIT

$ cat mysql.log
2009-09-02 17:15:01     58 -- select @@version_comment limit 1
2009-09-02 17:16:15     58 -- SELECT host,user,password FROM mysql.user
2009-09-02 17:16:30     58 -- SELECT table_schema,COUNT(*) FROM information_schema.tables GROUP BY table_schema
2009-09-02 17:16:39     58 -- SELECT NOW(), SLEEP(3)

Query Analysis

Restart proxy with the histogram.lua sample provided.

$ mysql-proxy --proxy-lua-script=share/doc/mysql-proxy/histogram.lua &

Connect and run some queries.

$ mysql -hhostname -P4040 -u -p
mysql>  SELECT host,user,password FROM mysql.user;
mysql>  SELECT table_schema,COUNT(*) FROM information_schema.tables GROUP BY table_schema;
mysql>  SELECT NOW(), SLEEP(3);

While connected to the proxy, you can now review data from two pseudo tables.

mysql>  SELECT * FROM histogram.tables;
mysql>  SELECT * FROM histogram.queries\G
mysql>  DELETE FROM histogram.tables;
mysql>  DELETE FROM histogram.queries;

mysql> SELECT * FROM histogram.tables;
+---------------------------+-------+--------+
| table                     | reads | writes |
+---------------------------+-------+--------+
| information_schema.tables |     1 |      0 |
| mysql.user                |     1 |      0 |
+---------------------------+-------+--------+

mysql> SELECT * FROM histogram.queries;
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+----------------+----------------+
| query                                                                                            | count | max_query_time | avg_query_time |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+----------------+----------------+
| SELECT @@version_comment LIMIT ?                                                                 |     1 |            300 |            300 |
| SELECT `table_schema` , COUNT( * ) FROM `information_schema` . `tables` GROUP BY `table_schema`  |     1 |           1822 |           1822 |
| SELECT `host` , `user` , `password` FROM `mysql` . `user`                                        |     1 |            494 |            494 |
| SELECT NOW( ) , SLEEP( ? )                                                                       |     1 |        3000735 |        3000735 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------+----------------+----------------+

Moving forward

The power is that with Lua you have the flexibility to write your own logging. Some improvements to these scripts could be.

  • Add the query time, number of rows, and result set size to the logging
  • Be able to sort histogram results or see top percentile. Being able to copy data into real tables would enable any level of analysis
  • Combine the logging and histogram scripts
  • Enable global enable/disabling of logging with SET GLOBAL commands
  • Support variable length IN queries, those that pass multiple values, so you end up with a subset of all queries
  • Provide a actual query example, making it easy to do a QEP. For normalized queries you need to do additional work to find values.
  • The histogram does not support the C API multi query functionality, where multiple queries can be passed to the server at one time. The problem is there is no way to time the individual queries.

Read on in SQL Analysis with MySQL Proxy – Part 2.

References

A good introduction document
MySQL Proxy – From architecture to implementation – OSCON 2008

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Posted in Databases, Linux, MySQL, MySQL Proxy, Open Source, Professional | 2 Comments »