Percona Toolkit is a collection of advanced open source command-line tools, developed and used by the Percona technical staff, that are engineered to perform a variety of MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL server and system tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

You can get summaries of your database servers, or you verify replication lag on MySQL and PostgreSQL servers. You get thirty-eight scripts that can do any manner of actions, and you will find them very valuable in your regular database work. And did I mention they are open source?!

Percona Toolkit may already be in your distro by default in many Linux distros, such as Fedora, Homebrew, and Debian. And you can get it from us at Percona.

Installation is easy with the software comes in popular package formats. Follow the guide to installing the Percona repositories and then either sudo apt-get install percona-toolkit or sudo yum install percona-toolkit.

The one tricky part is installing the User-Defined Functions (UDF) needed for a few of the tools. I ran into the common error message:

But it is very simple to get the shared objects copied to where they need to be located.

Then, those shared objects need to be loaded into into the server.

 

Pt-summary, pt-mysql-summary, and pt-pg-summary

For an example of what the Percona Toolkit offers, look at the output from pt-summary. This is a handy way to determine the basic parameters that the server is using.

The specifics for a MySQL server cover the details you will want to know about that instance can easily be had by using pt-mysql-sumary.

And pt-pg-summary is the analog for the PostgreSQL server.

So why is this valuable?

All the information that can be had from pt-summary, pt-mysql-summary, and pt-pg-summary can be had with SQL queries. But under pressure, will you remember all the needed statements? These scripts make it easier to get the needed information in one swoop.

This is also a great source of information to archive for future reference. Need to know what the last known good configuration looked like? Were you running SELinux when you set up the server? This is the type of information that is invaluable if you have hit handy and frustrating when you do not have it when tracing issues.

In the future, we will look at more of the Percona Toolkit and its uses.

Free your DBAs to focus on higher priorities.

 

Download Percona Toolkit

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Jouni “Rautamiekka” Järvinen

Symlinks.