My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual suspects (e.g. Maatkit), some of these are actually collections of different utilities by themselves. As it's impossible to go over each individual component in the given time frame, I will try to pick out the most popular/useful parts related to the scopes mentioned above. But I will also cover some lesser known gems that migh be worth taking a look at. What's your the most valued tool in your toolchest? I am still looking for more inspiration.

I look forward to being at the conference again and meeting with colleagues and friends in the MySQL community. Judging from the current schedule, it will be a very interesting mix of talks.

If you're interested in attending, you should consider registering soon! The early registration ends on March 15th. Until then, I encourage you to make use of this "Friend of Speaker" discount code (25% off): mys10fsp

You can use Maatkit to prove replication is working correctly, fix corrupted data, automate repetitive tasks, speed up your servers, and much, much more.

One of the first things you can do after installing the toolkit (which may already be installed if you are running CentOS or Debian) is to run the mk-audit utility. It will give you a nice summary of your server, as well as point out potential problems in your configuration.

Here's a list of all the utilities included in Maatkit:

• mk-archiver Archive rows from a MySQL table into another table or a file.
• mk-audit Analyze, summarize and report on MySQL config, schema and operation
• mk-checksum-filter Filter checksums from mk-table-checksum.
• mk-deadlock-logger Extract and log MySQL deadlock information.
• mk-duplicate-key-checker Find duplicate indexes and foreign keys on MySQL tables.
• mk-fifo-split Split files and pipe lines to a fifo without really splitting.
• mk-find Find MySQL tables and execute actions, like GNU find.
• mk-heartbeat Monitor MySQL replication delay.
• mk-kill Kill MySQL queries that match certain criteria.
• mk-loadavg Watch MySQL load and take action when it gets too high.
• mk-log-player Split and play MySQL slow logs.
• mk-parallel-dump Dump sets of MySQL tables in parallel.
• mk-parallel-restore Load files into MySQL in parallel.
• mk-profile-compact Compact the output from mk-query-profiler.
• mk-query-digest Parses logs and more. Analyze, transform, filter, review and report on queries.
• mk-query-profiler Execute SQL statements and print statistics, or measure activity caused by other processes.
• mk-show-grants Canonicalize and print MySQL grants so you can effectively replicate, compare and version-control them.
• mk-slave-delay Make a MySQL slave server lag behind its master.
• mk-slave-find Find and print replication hierarchy tree of MySQL slaves.
• mk-slave-move Move a MySQL slave around in the replication hierarchy.
• mk-slave-prefetch Pipeline relay logs on a MySQL slave to pre-warm caches.
• mk-slave-restart Watch and restart MySQL replication after errors.
• mk-table-checksum Perform an online replication consistency check, or checksum MySQL tables efficiently on one or many servers.
• mk-table-sync Synchronize MySQL tables efficiently.
• mk-upgrade Execute SQL statements against two MySQL servers and compare the results.
• mk-visual-explain Format EXPLAIN output as a tree.