Shlomi shows a real world scenario where the naive approach to monitoring fails spectacularly.

We all love graphs. We all love SQL hacks. We all know the SQL hack which displays a character-based graph (example follows for those unfamiliar). But we all love horizontal graphs, not vertical ones. We are used to the X axis being horizontal, Y being vertical. Not vice versa. In this post I’ll present a SQL hack which rotates a vertical graph to horizontal. In fact, the technique shown will rotate any ‘textual image’; but graphs are a nice example.

I’ve been working on various different MySQL related issues and maintenance procedures some of which have not gone according to plan. Here is a recipe that may help you avoid wasting a lot of time, especially if your database is large.

There is a cool option for mysqlbinlog for disabling the binary log when doing recovery using binary logs, namely --disable-log-bin. There are various ways for doing this.

A tip to kill a long lasting query without losing the current connection.