RDS brings with it the promise of MySQL on a Cloud. Having been a MySQL fan for quite some time now, I was itching to get my hands on an AWS account and check out what the hype was all about. Imagine my confusion when I signed up for Amazon RDS and all the AWS Management Console showed me was the EC2 dashboard! It was time I downloaded the Getting Started Guide and went through the rigmarole of studying it.

Setting up the Command Line Interface Tools

Apparently, there is no GUI yet for RDS. The only way to go about using it is through the CLI tools. Setting up the tools, however, can be quite a pain: There are no installers per se; you have to download the archive, extract it, and set up the environment manually. Here’s how I did it on my Windows XP box:

• Prerequisites: The CLI tools are written in Java. So you need to have either JDK or JRE installed on your system to be able to run them. I had JRE 6 installed.
• The Environment: There are a couple of environment variables that need to be set, manually:
  • The JAVA_HOME variable, containing the path of the Java runtime installed on the system.
  • The AWS_RDS_HOME variable, containing the path to the folder containing the CLI tools.

C:\>set JAVA_HOME=E:\Java\jre6

C:\>set AWS_RDS_HOME=C:\Amazon RDS\CLI

• The Credential File: The archive containing the CLI tools also had a file named credential-file-path.template. I copied my AWS Access and Secret Keys into the place holders in the file, and then had to set yet another environment variable:

C:\>set AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE=C:\Amazon RDS\CLI\credential-file-path.template

• One Last Thing: Finally, I was almost done (setting up the CLI tools, that is)! All I had to do was add the path of the CLI tools to the PATH variable:

C:\>set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Amazon RDS\CLI

Creating a Database Instance

I went on to create an Extra Large database instance, with an allocated storage of 5GB:

C:\>rds-create-db-instance --engine MySQL5.1 --master-username root --master-user-password mypass
--db-name WebyogTestData --db-instance-identifier webyogtestinstance --allocated-storage 5
--db-instance-class db.m1.xlarge –-header
DBINSTANCE  DBInstanceId        Class         Engine    Storage  Master Username
Status    Backup Retention
DBINSTANCE  webyogtestinstance  db.m1.xlarge  mysql5.1  5        root
creating  1
SECGROUP  Name     Status
SECGROUP  default  active
PARAMGRP  Group Name        Apply Status
PARAMGRP  default.mysql5.1  in-sync
C:\>

The rds-decribe-db-instances command displays all the running instances:

C:\>rds-describe-db-instances
DBINSTANCE  webyogtestinstance  2009-11-06T08:40:52.571Z  db.m1.xlarge  mysql5.1
5   root  available  webyogtestinstance.clc2ed76md1v.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com 3306  us-east-1d  1
SECGROUP  default  active
PARAMGRP  default.mysql5.1  in-sync
C:\>

Voila! My database is up and running in no time.

Setting up SQLyog/MONyog to Connect to Amazon RDS

Here’s the best part about Amazon RDS: It has native MySQL 5.1 support. (Well, at this time, it supports  no other RDBMS, but may be  it will in the future.) This means that I can use my favorite MySQL GUI tool to connect to the Amazon RDS database instance. Or at least that’s what Amazon claims.

I filled in the master user name and password that I had used to create the DB instance. For the host address, I used webyogtestinstance.clc2ed76md1v.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com (I noticed it in the output of the rds-describe-db-instances command).

Apprehensively, I clicked on the Test Connection button and without a hitch it connected successfully. Notice that SQLyog reports as having connected to MySQL 5.1.38-log.

Setting up MONyog was as simple.

MONyog displaying the InnoDB Cache stats

In Conclusion

RDS is but a MySQL 5.1 instance running on an EC2 platform, bringing with it all the advantages of EC2. You can scale your server to use up to 68GB of memory, 26 ECUs, and 1TB of persistent storage. On the flip-side, Amazon RDS does not support replication yet.

Periodically, the Amazon RDS system performs some maintenance of the database instance. This ensures that your server is running smoothly. This also translates into a 4-hour down time period on a weekly basis.

There is a pattern emerging here, if you look close enough. Back in 2008, at about the same time, when it became clear that Microsoft would announce a Windows-based Cloud, Amazon jumped in and announced support for Windows-based EC2 instances. And Amazon has managed to do it again with RDS. Microsoft, it seems, drives Amazon harder than users do.

For us at Webyog this is an exciting development. We believe that our products (SQLyog and MONyog) are very well ‘fit for the Cloud’.  Much more fit than the console-based tools that most advanced users still seem to use.  We will now start checking our programs in detail with this. Till now we’ve found no issues.

Want to Know More?

Read more about Amazon RDS froom their website.

Amazon RDS Functionality.

Pricing plans for Amazon RDS.

Sign up for Amazon RDS.

Features:
* Delayed alert notifications. It can now be defined that a problem must have existed for a number of sample intervals continuously  (’in a row’)  for an alert to be sent.  A global setting for each server is available from GUI. For individual counters the global setting can be overridden by defining the RetryOverride (like ‘RetryOverride:3′) property of the (javascript) counter definition in Tools… Customize interface.
* Added counters for monitoring I/O parameters on Linux systems (similar to ‘iostat’).
* Host and user information is added (optionally) to the Query Analyzer output.  Note:  this option is currently not available for proxy based sniffer.
* Duplicate/Clone Server functionality added to GUI.
* Added direct link to customize counters from the Monitors/Advisors page.

Bug Fixes:
* Notifications did not take ‘base time’ setting and/or ‘uptime_since_flush-status’ status variable into account.
* If SSH setting for retrieving Linux system information were once selected and later deselected again, graphs without any information would appear in Dashboard and in MONyog.log errors were recorded.
* Now  ”busy” icon is displayed while saving/deleting a connection. When MONyog was controlled from a browser running on a remote machine the absence of this could cause confusion about if change had effect.
* A garbage string like “0NaN/0NaN/NaN 0NaN:0NaN:0NaN” could be displayed when editing log analyzer filter settings.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Bug Fixes:
* When connected to a 5.0 server compiled without PROFILING option and with Query Profiler/SHOW PROFILE  feature enabled SQLyog would still send PROFILING-related queries.  It was not properly detected that the server did not support this. MySQL versions from 5.1 and up (also when compiled without PROFILING option) were not affected.
* In DATA and RESULT tabs/text mode unicode/non-ASCII characters could cause a change of the font that was used for displaying data. This was an old bug from when introducing full unicode support in 6.0.
* In RESULT tab BLOB/TEXT data would sometimes not display beginning of data in GRID. This bug was introduced in 8.15.

Miscellaneous:
* EXPLAIN EXTENDED option is now disabled as default in Query Profiler.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Bug Fixes:
* Exports as Excel-XML was broken in 8.15 . Empty strings and ZERO’s occurred instead of data.
* ‘Search and replace’ could truncate the result. Also this bug was introduced in 8.15.

Miscellaneous:
* SQLyog Application Manifest was updated to return version information.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Features:
* Added an option to execute SHOW WARNINGS automatically if the ‘warning-count’ is not 0. The output will appear in MESSAGES tab. Note: this is not implemented for HTTP-tunneling.
* Improved the memory handling in GRIDS with BLOB/TEXT columns. This fixes some slugginess when scrolling a GRID containing such data.

Bug Fixes:
* A dump containing VIEWs created on an early 5.0-server could fail to restore on recent servers. The underlying reason is a bug with the ‘default’ column in the output of SHOW FULL FIELDS on the early 5.0 servers. But we can avoid using this information and this is what we did now.
* Copy database/table from a 3.x or 4.0 server to a more recent server failed with column names containing special characters.
* If a sqlyog.ini files exists in installation folder it should be copied to ‘AppData’ folder. This is required for upgrading from versions before 6.06. However with latest releases an empty file was created in ‘AppData’.
* The ‘Import External Data Tool’ could truncate strings when importing data from a 4D database. It is actually a bug in the 4D ODBC driver but we found a workaround.
* SSL-connections failed if authentication keys were created with cipher option.
* SQL-exports generated INSERTS for MERGE and FEDERATED tables.
* In INFO-tab/text-mode we will now not highlight ’string literals’. A comment with an odd number of quotes would make following lines display with ’string literal’ highlighting/coloring.
* When connected with SSH-tunneling to a Windows machine with Cygwin SSHD the bash.exe process created for each connection did not close again.
* CREATE TABLE … advanced options did not set some create-options to ‘default’.
* Execution of some queries would be slow with Query profiler/EXPLAIN extended selected. Most important queries with a UNION were affected. Technically it was an issue with the Query Formatter code and how it ‘hooked’ into the program. This bug was introduced in 8.0.
* Windows Vista and higher could warn that SQLyog was not properly installed due to lack of an Application Manifest. It was false alarm but now such Manifest is included with the installer.

Miscellaneous:
* Functionality change: Before this release we stripped out the database name from Stored Program and View SQL-code when generating SQL-dumps and when copying a database to another host. Also Schema Sync did with VIEWs. This was in order to make it easy to import/copy to another database.  However with tables named identical to the database and when database names was a substring of a table name it failed sometimes.  We realize now that SQL code inside Stored Programs and Views may be so complex that parsing for the database name and stripping it is not safe.  With this release we have stopped this ’stripping’ and Stored Programs and Views will be dumped by SQLyog identically to what  ‘mysqldump’ does.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

We are pleased to announce MONyog 3.5 – a major new release. Listed below are the major features included in this release.

Error Log Monitoring

Monitoring the MySQL error log is absolutely critical for any MySQL DBA. Ignore the error log at your own peril! Many of our customers wanted an out-of-the-box solution for monitoring the error log. With the latest release, MONyog becomes the first MySQL Monitoring Tool to monitor the MySQL Error logs. MONyog can optionally send notifications over SMTP or SNMP for MySQL error log events that require attention.

As usual, none of the features of MONyog require you to install agents or additional software on hosts running MySQL.

SNMP Traps

We have introduced SNMP traps support in MONyog 3.5. SNMP traps enable MONyog to notify the management station of significant events.

Query Analyzer (QA) Output can now be exported

MONyog customers love the ability to find problem SQL without being forced to configure their applications to connect through MySQL Proxy. While MONyog’s Query Analyzer has complete support for MySQL Proxy, MONyog can also find problem SQL by parsing the Slow Query Log and/or by taking a snapshot of SHOW PROCESSLIST at regular intervals.

The report created by Query Analyzer can now be exported as CSV. This means that you can further customize the report using a spreadsheet or by simply importing the CSV output into a MySQL table for further analysis.

New advisors

We have introduced a bunch of new advisors that help MySQL DBAs manage more MySQL servers, tune their current MySQL servers and fix problems with their MySQL database applications before they can become serious problems.

MONyog 3.5 now supports 220+ monitors and advisors created by top-notch MySQL experts.

Lot of minor features and bug fixes

This release also contains many bug fixes, UI improvements and minor features. You can find the complete release notes here.

MONyog customers can download the latest installers from Webyog’s Customer Portal.
To evaluate MONyog, please download the 30-day trials.

We are very excited about this release, and hope that you will like it. We would love to hear from you.

Regards,
Team MONyog

Bug Fixes:
* Execution of some queries would be slow with Query profiler/EXPLAIN extended selected. Most important queries with a UNION were affected.  Technically it was an issue with the Query Formatter code and how it ‘hooked’ into the program. This bug  was introduced in 8.0.
* Copy database/table could be slow if  BULK INSERTS option was selected in ‘preferences’. This bug  was introduced in 8.15 beta 1.
* 8.15 RC could crash when executing a LOAD DATA statement. This first RC was build with a recent 5.1 client library. Before 8.15 RC we used a 5.0 library.  We have now reverted back to 5.0 (5.0.86 client library is used with this release). Issue with the 5.1 client library is not fully understood but it may be related to known memory issues reported with it.

Miscellaneous:
* Functionality change: Before this release we stripped out the database name from Stored Program and View SQL-code when generating SQL-dumps and and when copying a database to another host. Also Schema Sync did with VIEWs. This was in order to make it easy to import/copy to another database. However with tables named identical to the database and when database names was a substring of a table name it failed sometimes. We realize now that SQL code inside Stored Programs and Views may be so complex that parsing for the database name and stripping it is not safe. With this release we have stopped this ’stripping’ and Stored Programs and Views will be dumped by SQLyog identically to what ‘mysqldump’ does.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Features:
* Alerts can now be sent as SNMP traps.
* Support for MySQL error log. An alert can be sent when the error log has an entry of type [ERROR] and the error log entry can be viewed in MONyog web interface as well.
* Query Analyzer data can now be exported as CSV.
* Updated and added advisors.
* EXPLAIN/view query from Processlist page will now open in a new browser tab.
* Alerts (mails or traps) will now list the ip of the machine running the MONyog instance (request from users who had more than one MONyog instance).
* Graphs/charts will now have new colors that make the graphs more readable.
* Added next/previous links in register/edit servers page.

Bug Fixes:
* Lots of fixes for browser-specific issues.
* If identical queries were logged from more clients with same timestamp, Query Analyzer/slow query log would only count that query once.
* Long BULK INSERTS would not display properly in Query Analyzer if the option to ‘replace literals’ was selected.
* Deleting a server registered as number ‘0001′ did not delete the sniffer.data file for that server.

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

Bug Fixes:
* Copy database/table from a 3.x or 4.0 server to a more recent server failed  with column names containing special characters.
* If a sqlyog.ini files exists in installation folder it should be copied to ‘AppData’ folder. This is required for upgrading from versions before 6.06.  However with latest releases an empty file was created in ‘AppData’.
* The ‘Import External Data Tool’ could truncate strings when importing data from a 4D database. It is actually a bug in the 4D ODBC driver but we found a workaround.
* SSL-connections failed if authentication keys were created with cipher option.
* SQL-exports generated INSERTS for MERGE and FEDERATED tables.
* In INFO-tab/text-mode we will now not highlight ’string literals’. A comment with an odd number of quotes would make following lines display with ’string literal’ highlighting/coloring.
* When connected with SSH-tunelling to a Windows machine with Cygwin SSHD the bash.exe process created for each connection did not close again.
* CREATE TABLE .. advanced options did not set some create-options to ‘default’

Downloads: http://webyog.com/en/downloads.php
Purchase: http://webyog.com/en/buy.php

SELECT * FROM `first`;
/* returns
a
——
1
2
3
*/

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `second`(`a` INT) SELECT * FROM `third`;

SELECT * FROM `first`;
/* returns
a
——
1
2
3
7
8
9
*/

Think about it!  Of course some special conditions will need to exist for this to be reproducible.

More details will appear here in a couple of days.