Use MySQL? You need Maatkit

Maatkit is a pretty useful set of utilities for MySQL. From their site:

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.