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Maatkit tools for database administrators

Order into Chaos

Maatkit [1], which was named after Maat, the Egyptian goddess of order and justice, gives administrators and developers a comprehensive collection of command-line tools written in Perl that helps extend the functionality of database management systems (DBMSs) and facilitates management tasks.

For example, you can check to see whether replication is working correctly, identify and repair damaged files, quickly export tables into files, parse data from files, or output the privileges assigned to individual database users.

Most of the features were written for MySQL [2]; however, Maatkit does support other free database management systems, including PostgreSQL [3] and Memcached [4].

Maatkit was developed in 2006 by Baron Schwartz. Since 2008, Daniel Nichter has been the main developer, although Schwartz still contributes suggestions for new tools and features. Both Schwartz and Nichter work for database specialist Percona, which has often impressed users in the past with performance-boosting patches for MySQL [5].

Maatkit installs with just a couple of keystrokes. Many package repositories include the tool selection, but, if this is not the case with your distribution, you can download the source code and DEB or RPM packages off the project website. To download and start using an individual tool quickly, you can also try:

wget http://www.maatkit.org/get/ toolname

Maatkit currently includes 30 tools; Admin magazine picked a couple of them for closer inspection.

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