Deep-inspecting MySQL with DTrace

DTrace on Solaris, OpenSolaris and MacOSX allows dynamic tracing into any running application without any source modifications – besides information provided by operating system, it can also attach to any function or even instruction.

Once MySQL source and internals are available to everyone, it opens ability for anyone to deep-inspect any part of MySQL operation – aggregate statistics in various views and scopes: *how much File I/O does each user make? *which table access causes most mutex contention? *where does MySQL spend most of CPU time? *etc

Though there are lots of generic DTrace tools (part of DtraceToolkit), that can help a lot with understanding MySQL performance, it is way more powerful to attach to MySQL itself and extract much more interesting data.

This presentation will show how to do all that, as well as show home-grown tools of various engineers to visualize and analyze the output.