SYRACUSE, USA: Many MySQL DBAs are frustrated by their inability to account for high server usage. The engineers at Software Workshop had similar feelings when trying to find 'usage hogs' among web hosting clients. Current tools provide good reports on overall activity -- but none report usage by individual users, a specific database, or connecting client.

Relying on years of expertise, Software Workshop developed their own modifications to Open Source MySQL and called it ExtSQL. It gives DBAs a simple way to monitor activity by individual users, database, or even connection. ExtSQL has new commands built into the server as an extension to the SQL language, e.g. SHOW STATISTICS select, insert FROM user HISTORY -- allows the DBA to see the number of select and insert statements issued by all users by hour.

Kelly Button, a senior admin stated, "We used to see spikes in usage, but it was difficult to track down to an individual customer. ExtSQL makes monitoring easy; especially since it also stores historical data. High usage patterns are easy to track and often times the customers didn't even know they were running poorly designed applications."

MySQL has an installed base of millions, with many installations running older versions. DBAs can be very reluctant to go through an upgrade process. Software Workshop decided to pursue this huge 'aftermarket' by offering source patches and binaries for older versions of MySQL on a variety of OS and hardware combinations. They've already been featured in Linux Journal's October 2008 edition new products column. ExtSQL is being released under the GPL and can be found at http://www.ExtSQL.com/

Software Workshop is a member of the INCITS H2 Technical Committee (the U.S. National Standards body with responsibility for SQL) and has made an initial proposal SQL be extended to define a usage accounting standard that could be implemented by other DB vendors such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

A company spokesperson said, "We anticipate our source code will eventually become part of the main MySQL distributions. But we hope to remain a focal point for future development and anticipate feedback and changes generated by the user community."