MySQL High Availability

Chapter 9. Storage Engine Monitoring

Joel was enjoying his morning latte when his phone rang. It startled him because until now he had never heard it ring. He lifted the receiver and heard engine noises. Expecting the call was a wrong number, he said hesitantly, “Hello?”

“Joel! Glad I caught you.” It was Mr. Summerson, calling from his car.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m on my way to the airport to meet with the sales staff in the Seattle office. I wanted to ask you to look into the new application database. The developers in Seattle tell me they think we need to figure out a better configuration for performance.”

Joel had expected something like this. He knew a little about MyISAM and InnoDB, but he wasn’t familiar with monitoring, much less tuning their performance. “I can look into it, sir.”

“Great. Thanks, Joel. I’ll email you.” The connection was severed before Joel could reply. Joel finished the last of his latte and started reading about storage engines in MySQL.

Now that you know when your servers are performing well (and when they aren’t), how do you know how well your storage engines are performing? If you are hosting one or more transactional databases or need your storage engine to perform at its peak for fast queries, you will need to monitor the storage engines. In this chapter, we discuss advanced monitoring, focusing on monitoring and improving storage engine performance, by examining the two most popular storage engines: MyISAM and InnoDB.

Having multiple interchangeable storage engines ...