DBAs don’t mind getting the attention of the management, as long as it’s for a positive reason. I mean once in a while, but not all the time; many would still prefer to remain off-radar, quietly ensuring the organization’s databases stay running without a hitch.
Since they have significant accountability in an organization, it is essential for them to beware of all the things that could go south. They can do this by following certain excellent practices for monitoring and MySQL SQL performance tuning, which we will explain in this post.
Best MySQL Database and SQL Monitoring Practices
With these practices, you can avoid being recognized by management for the database outage that took four days to fix, instead of your people skills.
- Conduct Regular Health Checks of Your Database
A database administrator knows how important it is to schedule regular health checks for their database. Note that every database has its own maintenance requirements, and that the health checks should be geared toward particular functional needs.
Databases that are non-critical do not require as frequent checks as mission-critical or life-critical databases. A local bookshop’s customer rewarding app failing isn’t as severe as the failure of a missile defense system, for instance.
- Monitor MySQL Availability
This is perhaps the most essential metric to follow, since the unavailability of the database won’t leave much choice, nor will the other metrics matter until this particular issue is resolved. Use the Run dialog to check availability. You need to type in “ -mysqladmin -h 192.168.1.95 -u root -p” to do so, and initiate diagnostics in case there’s a problem.
- Check for Unsuccessful Connections & Error Logs
Monitoring the list of unsuccessful connections can slowly but surely help you identify both malicious activity and errors that aren’t as serious (caused by human error like incorrect id\password or misapplied permissions), in the application.
You are likely to get a broader picture in this manner, which will enable you to recognize larger recurring problems so that you can address them appropriately. You can keep track of failed connections by running the following command –
SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE ‘aborted_connects’;
– to know the number of aborted connection attempts on the database in a provided time range.
- Identify Deadlocks in InnoDB
In MySQL database and SQL, a deadlock takes place when multiple transactions put a lock on a resource required by another transaction. Deadlocks lead to retarded processing, increased timeouts – and unhappy users. Using the query “SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;” will help you find deadlocks and fix them.
- Observe Configuration Changes
An abrupt decline in performance can be the result of any number of causes. However, checking for any recent configuration changes can help you spot any adversely affecting ones and save you a considerable amount of time.
- Keep an Eye On the Slow Queries Log
Queries that are slow make the database operate slower as well. This is due to an increase in CPU and memory usage. Assess the Slow Queries log from time to time to know if any queries are taking excessive time to run. You can then proceed towards identifying the root cause and resolving it.
- Maintain Visibility to Comprehend the Main Reason Behind Performance Issues
Although regular health checks are important for MySQL SQL performance tuning from the perspective of maintaining high availability, they are not as useful in terms of overall system troubleshooting.
This is because periodic performance concerns may not appear during a routine health check, which is also why a consistent visibility must be established with the MySQL environment.
The quicker you can uncover and fix performance related problems, the fewer the users that will be affected, since downtime will be considerably decreased.
Setting alerts for critical occurrences can give you the chance to react as quickly as possible, in case a threshold is surpassed. You may set alert thresholds for these typical performance deterioration sources, at least –
- Substantial deviations from baseline metrics, in terms of performance tuning in SQL MySQL
- Excessive CPU utilization
- Query latency
- Query faults
- Connection restraints
- Buffer pool usage
- Identify and Resolve Performance Issues Quickly
A database monitoring and MySQL SQL performance tuning tool is going to be the best option in nearly every case, so that issues are resolved before they grow into bigger problems.
There are plenty of performance tuning and monitoring tools on the market that come with a broad range of features at varying price ranges. Choosing the right one for your database will depend on your budget and requirements.
As long as you know what to look for in a performance tuning tool, you won’t have many issues in making your selection. Given below are a few features you should consider if you want a tool to perform SQL tuning for MySQL –
- Scalability
- Mobile tracking
- Intuitive User Interface
- Affordable yet feature-filled
- Zero connection limitations
- Different analysis variations, such as
- Multidimensional workload analysis
- Alarm source analysis
- Blocking analysis
- Smart alarms
- Historical data monitoring