We talked to Mark Matthews and Andy Bang, two core developers in the MySQL Enterprise Monitor team, to give us some insight into the new features in the latest MySQL Enterprise Release. You can find more about the MySQL Query Analyzer in the previous interviews for Fall 2008 Release and Fall 2009 Release

[Note: MySQL Enterprise is our commercial subscription offering. And, MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MySQL Query Analyzer are only available with this commercial subscription.]

Q: Mark, could you share with us what's new in the MySQL Enterprise Spring 2010 Release?

One important new feature is that now we instrument some of the MySQL Connectors to capture the Query Analyzer data from inside the application. Whether you're running Java or .Net applications, using MySQL Connector Plug-ins with the Query Analyzer reduces latency, has fewer moving parts to manage (i.e. no need to have Proxy), and you can capture additional information from the application point of view. For example, you can tell where the troublesome queries actually originated in the source code, and response times are reported as they would be seen by your users. Using the MySQL Connectors we can actually point to the specific spot where the application is causing problems. This has been a cross-product team effort, with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor team implementing the backend and Connectors team implementing the plug-ins that collect and forward the information.

Also, we now support authentication via LDAP so you can integrate the Enterprise Monitor into a directory server � like Oracle Identity Server, Open LDAP, or Microsoft Active Directory. Depending on how the feature is configured, you can have your directory service handle all authentication and roles so that certain roles listed in your directory match the roles in the Enterprise Monitor. Alternatively you can use it just for authentication with user name and password, as well as use mixed modes where there are users local to the monitor, for example agents, and other users defined in your directory server. We're hoping that this feature simplifies user account management for those customers who have standardized on a directory service for their authentication system.

Last but not least, much of the user interface has been reworked to make it easier to use and more flexible. It's now possible to have multiple windows or tabs open against the same monitor instance, which is nice when you want to keep multiple troubleshooting contexts at your fingertips. We've also added or extended filtering and searching to most features. For example, on the "Graphs" tab, you can filter by the graph name; in "Manage Servers", you can search and filter by server attributes such as server name or MySQL version; and in the Query Analyzer, you can filter for queries that are doing table scans, using bad indexes or for your specific requirement by creating expressions against any attribute that you see in the list of collected queries.

Q: Before we get to more details into the new features, can you refresh our memory on what the MySQL Query Analyzer does?

What the MySQL Query Analyzer does is capture every query, times them and reports them in aggregate, back up to the Service Manager repository. You can then use this data to do all kinds of interesting things. You can roll up these statistics across all your servers, or across groups of servers that we have automatically detected in replication topologies. You can sort by query type. You can search through them using regular expressions, you can see the minimum, maximum, average and distributions of execution times, execution counts, row and update counts, result set sizes, and actual amount of data transferred and you can even bring up EXPLAIN plans of queries that have been captured without leaving the application. With the MySQL Query Analyzer, the DBA can take a look at operating system and MySQL performance counters and correlate them with the queries that are flowing through their databases at the same time to diagnose performance issues, all in one place. It's a big time saver.

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