DTrace has been something that I’ve been trying to get into the MySQL server for more than a year now.After a combination of my own patches and working with Mikael Ronstrom and Alexey Kopytov we finally have a suite of probes in MySQL 6.0.8. Better still, after a short hiatus while I was busy working on a million-and-one other things, the documentation for those probes is now available: Tracing mysqld with DTrace. The documentation is comparatively light and deep all at the same time. It’s lightweight from the perspective that I’ve added very little detail on the mechanics of DTrace itself, since there is no need to replicate the excellent guides that Sun already provide on the topic. At the same time, I’ve tried to provide at least one (and sometimes two) D script examples for each of the groups of probes in the 6.0.8 release. So what next for MySQL DTrace probes? Well, the next version of the probes has already been worked on. I’ve been testing them for a month or so, and due to a problem with the probes on SPARC I couldn’t approve the patch, but I managed to resolve that last week. The new patch extends the probes to enable a more detailed look at certain operations, and it enables us to expand the probes to be placed anywhere within the server, including individual engine-level row operations. If you want a demonstration of DTrace in MySQL, some of the things you can monitor without using the user probes we’ve added, and those new probes I just mentioned, then you will want to attend the MySQL University session this Thursday (12th Feb), at 14:00UTC where I’ll be doing all of the above. As a side note, because I know there are people interested, last week I also finished the patch for these probes to go into the MySQL 5.1.30 version that we will be putting into OpenSolaris. Sunanda is working on getting that release out there as I type this.