Tools for MySQL Users - High Performance MySQL - page 667

In addition to these tools, there are a variety of others that are less formally packaged
and maintained. Many of the prominent MySQL community members have contrib-
uted tools at one time or another, mostly hosted on their own websites or on the MySQL
Forge ( http://forge.mysql.com ). You can find a great deal of information by watching
the Planet MySQL blog aggregator over time ( http://planet.mysql.com ), but unfortu-
nately there is no single central directory for these tools.
SQL Utilities
There are a variety of free add-ons and utilities you can use from within the server itself;
some of them are quite powerful indeed:
common_schema
Shlomi Noach's common_schema project ( http://code.openark.org/forge/common
_schema ) is a powerful set of routines and views for server scripting and adminis-
tration. The common_schema is to MySQL as jQuery is to JavaScript.
mysql-sr-lib
Giuseppe Maxia created a library of stored routines for MySQL, which you can
find at http://www.nongnu.org/mysql-sr-lib/ .
UDF repository for MySQL
Roland Bouman has curated a collection of user-defined functions for MySQL,
which is available at http://www.mysqludf.org .
MySQL Forge
At the MySQL Forge ( http://forge.mysql.com ) , you'll find hundreds of community-
contributed programs, scripts, snippets, utilities, and tips and tricks.
Monitoring Tools
In our experience, most MySQL shops primarily need two kinds of monitoring: tools
for health monitoring—detecting and alerting when something goes wrong—and re-
cording metrics for trending, diagnosis, troubleshooting, capacity planning, and so on.
Most systems are good at only one of these tasks, and can't do a good job of both.
Unfortunately, there are dozens of tools to choose from, making it a very time-intensive
process to evaluate the offerings and decide whether a specific one suits you well.
Most monitoring systems are not designed specifically to monitor MySQL servers. In-
stead, they are general-purpose systems designed to periodically check the status of
many kinds of resources, from machines to routers to software (such as MySQL). They
usually have some kind of plugin architecture and often come with plugins for MySQL.
You generally install a monitoring system on its own server and use it to monitor other
servers. If you're using it to monitor important systems, it will quickly become a critical
part of your infrastructure, so you might need to take extra steps, such as making the
monitoring system itself redundant with failover.