Quadrant Framework – rev7 update adds DyGraphs support

2011/05/20 by admin in MySQL Server, Programming, Python | Leave a comment

Quick update to the framework that was released yesterday; I’ve added automatic graph generation. I chose DyGraphs due to the quick ability to enable support – the HTML is very quick and simply loads the CSV data. It has the same zooming features of Highcharts without the JS overhead.

Now when you run a load test you will get (in the output directory) a mixture of files: the main cumulative CSV and HTML file for the hostname that was tested, and then one CSV and HTML per report variable that was tested. This means you don’t have to drag the main CSV file into an alternate program or spend time parsing out certain variables one at a time to generate specific graphs. I’ve also added support for limiting output of SNMP variables (LOAD,CPU,MEM). Head over here and download the update: http://code.google.com/p/quadrant-framework/

To enable the graph generation, as it is not on by default, use this flag: –output-graphcode-enable

MySQL Community – what do you want in a load testing framework?

2011/05/09 by admin in MySQL Server, open source, Programming, Python | 2 Comments

So I’ve been doing a fair number of automated load tests these past six months. Primarily with Sysbench, which is a fine, fine tool. First I started using some simple bash based loop controls to automate my overnight testing, but as usually happens with shell scripts they grew unwieldy and I rewrote them in python. Now I have some flexible and easily configurable code for sysbench based MySQL benchmarking to offer the community. I’ve always been a fan of giving back to such a helpful group of people – you’ll never hear me complain about “my time isn’t free”. So, let me know what you want in an ideal testing environment (from a load testing framework automation standpoint) and I’ll integrate it into my existing framework and then release it via the BSD license. The main goal here is to have a standardized modular framework, based on sysbench, that allows anyone to compare their server performance via repeatable tests. It’s fun to see other people’s benchmarks but it’s often difficult to repeat and compare since most tests aren’t fully documented in their blog posts – this could be a solution to that.

Currently I have the harness doing iterations based on:

incrementing (choose a global dynamic variable, ie: sync_binlog=0-1000) system values
storage engine vs storage engine for the same workload
thread quantity increments for read-only or read+write
N-nodes in a cluster workloads with WRR traffic distribution (need to code WLC and others)
QPS testing for connection pool vs open/close connection
multi-table vs single-table workloads

Outputs available: CSV, XML, JSON for easy integration into any number of the various graphing frameworks available. I’ll probably code up a light weight python http server preloaded with Highcharts and Sparklines so you can see your benchmarks easily without having to roll your own graphs.

Quick now, tell me what you’d like me to code for you!

Win a free book at the February Python Book Contest

2011/02/07 by admin in open source, Programming, Python, Uncategorized | 23 Comments

This month is a special month. It’s not because of Valentines day or even the exciting day where we see groundhogs. No, this month is special because I’m have a book contest where you, the reader, get to win something free for doing absolutely nothing more than posting a comment saying that you want one of the several books I have available in the contest.

So without getting into boring details I’ll keep this short. I’ve been reviewing a lot of books lately and I think it’s time to get some books into people’s hands to enjoy themselves. This month the giveaways are all Python oriented.

So, all you have to do is take a look at the following titles and post a comment here saying that you want one of them. At the end of the month two readers will be chosen via a random list sorting python script I’ve whipped up for just this purpose. You will then get an email from the publisher who will send a brand new e-copy of the book free of charge. I’ll also be reviewing these books at a later date for those that do not win the contest.

Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook

Python 2.6 Text Processing: Beginners Guide

Python 2.6 Graphics Cookbook

Post a comment now and tell me which book you want!

Python for Automation: using pdsh for a menu-driven command execution environment

2011/02/04 by admin in MySQL Server, Programming, Python, Scripts | Leave a comment

I’ve been playing around with some quick system automation scripts that are handy to use when you don’t want / need to setup a chef or puppet action. I like to keep all of my hostnames and login details in a MySQL database (a cmdb actually) but for this example we’ll just use a couple of nested lists. This script executes commands in parallel across the hosts you choose in the menu system via the “pdsh” command, so make sure you have that installed before running. Alternately you can change the command call to use ssh instead of pdsh for a serialized execution, but that’s not as fun or fast. With some customizations here and there you can expand this to operate parallelized jobs for simplifying daily work in database administration, usage reporting, log file parsing, or other system automation as you see fit. Here’s the code. Comments welcome as always!

#!/usr/bin/env python
## NAME: menu_parallel_execution.py
## DATE: 2011-02-04
## AUTHOR: Matt Reid
## WEBSITE: http://kontrollsoft.com
## EMAIL: mreid@kontrollsoft.com
## LICENSE: BSD http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

import commands
import sys
import os
import operator

ver = sys.version.split(' ')[0].split(".")
major=ver[:1]
minor=ver[1:2]
version="%s.%s"%(major[0],minor[0])
if version in ('2.4','2.3','2.2','2.1','2.0'):
	pyver = "old"
else:
	from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT, call
	pyver = "new"

def main():
        #This section of host definitions could be replaced by a database
        #call if you are storing your hosts in that manner, but we'll keep
        #this script simple for the time being.
	dc0 = [
		["host0-0","10.0.0.1","ssh-username"],
		["host0-1","10.0.0.2","ss-username"]]

	dc1 = [
		["host1-0","10.1.0.1","ssh-username"],
		["host1-1","10.1.0.2","ss-username"]]

	dc2 = [
		["host2-0","10.2.0.1","ssh-username"],
		["host2-1","10.2.0.2","ss-username"]]

	print '''[1] Datacenter-1
[2] Datacenter-2
[3] Datacenter-3
'''
	dc = int(raw_input("Datacenter ID: "))
	if dc == 1:
		hosts = dc0
	elif dc == 2:
		hosts = dc1
	elif dc == 3:
		hosts = dc3

	nodes = []
	stay = True
	while stay == True:
		i = 0
		nest = sorted(hosts, key=operator.itemgetter(0))
		for x in range(len(nest)):
			print "[%i] %s | %s"%(i,nest[i][1],nest[i][0])
			i+=1

		print "\nSelect node to add to execution list"
		ch = int(raw_input("ID: "))
		xx = [nest[ch][1],nest[ch][2]]
		nodes.append(xx)
		s = str(raw_input("\nAdd another node? [Y/n] "))
		if s == "n" or s == "N":
			stay = False

	if(pyver == "new"):
		addrs = ""
		for node in nodes:
			address = node[1]+"@"+node[0]+","
			address = address.rstrip("\n")
			addrs = addrs+address

		addrs = addrs.strip(",")
		cmd = str(raw_input("\nEnter the command to execute: "))				

		try:
			c = "pdsh -w %s %s"%(addrs,cmd)
			print "Executing: %s"%(c)
			call(c,shell=True)
		except:
			print "Failed to execute pdsh command: %s"%(c)
			sys.exit(1)

		sys.exit(0)

	if(pyver == "old"):
		print "Please upgrade to Python 2.6+"
		sys.exit(1)

## START
if __name__ == "__main__":
	try:
		retval = main()
	except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):
		sys.exit(1)

Review: MySQL for Python by Albert Lukaszewski

2011/01/22 by admin in open source, Programming, Python, Reviews | Leave a comment

Packt Publishing recently sent me a copy of MySQL for Python to review and after reading through the book I must say that I’m rather impressed at the variety of topics that the book covers.

It starts off with the basics of setting up MySQL for your testing/development needs by going over several of the common installation and configuration methods. After that it’s a quick intro for connection methods and simple error reporting for connections. The author gives a quick intro to CRUD and how it relates to databases and python before heading into the common tasks of simple queries. I was surprised to see some database profiling discussion; which is rather handy for a new coder or a person new to MySQL. Once the basics of Inserts/Selects/Updates/Deletes are covered, which is a rather quick read, there is a welcome discussion of transactions and commit methods – if you do not read this section and are new to MySQL then believe me, you’re missing a very important topic. Most people will gloss over the basics and head right to the more advanced chapters that feature exception handling, the all too common “the mysql server has gone away” error, date&time functions, aggregate functions, and metadata queries. These chapters were the most interesting to me as they covered some great code for python that I have not yet played around with. Previously I’ve done a lot of work on those topics with perl and php so seeing how they were done in python was a great treat. The code is concise, easy to read, and well explained.

A number of topics cover the time saving solutions that no one should be without. Namely, bulk data inserting, data formatting, row iteration, and CSV parsing. Logging methods for access and changes to the database are also covered, and in the end will save your development cycle a lot of time when you are troubleshooting app-to-db interaction.

Two chapters will be of interest to DBAs in particular, and possibly not as interesting to pure developers, of which these are the Disaster Recovery and MySQL Administration topics. The author covers offline backups as well as online hot backups, two sections that no DBA should be without. The code for this type of work is covered in a decent amount of discussion but, along with the other chapters in the book, the theory and background of the topic is also discussed which gives the new reader an understanding of “why” and not just left with the “how”. The administration section of the book covers user creation and permissions management, along with a bit of background on security involved with that task, and also goes into quite a lot of coverage on web-based GUI administration and command line interaction for admin purposes.

Overall I enjoyed the contents of the book and would recommend taking a look if you are new to Python and MySQL or are even looking for a quick reference to the common tasks of database driven application development. This book does not cover the common ORM database interactions you’re likely to see in an app like Django or Pylons, but it will give you a solid foundation on how python and MySQL interact without an abstraction layer. If you are writing quick admin code or building your own database interaction layer, then this book would do well to be in your collection.

You can find the book at Amazon or directly from Packt.

Simple Python: a job queue with threading

2011/01/20 by admin in Programming, Python, Scripts | 7 Comments

Every so often you need to use a queue to manage operations in an application. Python makes this very simple. Python also, as I’ve written about before, makes threading very easy to work with. So in this quick program I’ll describe via comments, how to make a simple queue where each job is processed by a thread. Integrating this code to read jobs from a mysql database would be trivial as well; simply replace the “jobs = [..." code with a database call to a row select query.

#!/usr/bin/env python
## DATE: 2011-01-20
## FILE: queue.py
## AUTHOR: Matt Reid
## WEBSITE: http://themattreid.com
from Queue import *
from threading import Thread, Lock

'''this function will process the items in the queue, in serial'''
def processor():
    if queue.empty() == True:
        print "the Queue is empty!"
        sys.exit(1)
    try:
        job = queue.get()
        print "I'm operating on job item: %s"%(job)
        queue.task_done()
    except:
        print "Failed to operate on job"

'''set variables'''
queue = Queue()
threads = 4

'''a list of job items. you would want this to be more advanced,
like reading from a file or database'''
jobs = [ "job1", "job2", "job3" ]

”’iterate over jobs and put each into the queue in sequence”’
for job in jobs:
     print “inserting job into the queue: %s”%(job)
     queue.put(job)

”’start some threads, each one will process one job from the queue”’
for i in range(threads):
     th = Thread(target=processor)
     th.setDaemon(True)
     th.start()

”’wait until all jobs are processed before quitting”’
queue.join()

Easy Python: MySQL connection and iteration

2010/08/10 by admin in Programming, Python, Scripts | Leave a comment

If you’ve been looking for a simple python script to use with MySQL that you can use to expand upon for your next project, check this one out. It has error handling for the connection, error handling for the sql call, and loop iteration for the rows returned.

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
import MySQLdb

my_host = "localhost"
my_user = "user"
my_pass = "password"
my_db = "test"

try:
    db = MySQLdb.connect(host=my_host, user=my_user, passwd=my_pass, db=my_db)
except MySQLdb.Error, e:
     print "Error %d: %s" % (e.args[0], e.args[1])
     sys.exit (1)

cursor = db.cursor()
sql = "select column1, column2 from table";
cursor.execute(sql)
results = cursor.fetchall()
for row in results:
    column1 = row[0]
    column2 = row[1]
    print "column1: %s, column2: %s"%(column1,column2)

db.close()

Reviewed: Python Testing by Daniel Arbuckle

2010/04/20 by admin in Programming, Python, Reviews | 2 Comments

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading “Python Testing: An easy and convenient approach to testing your python projects” from Packt Publishing. It’s been a quick read but a solid set of instructions on the different methods for the subject.

The book starts out very quickly with details about the various methods that are available, the means of automation for testing, and of course the environment you’d want to be in for working on the subjects that the book covers. It then, in the second chapter, moves into the guts of testing by describing the basics of doctest via syntax and some simple examples, and then moves on to a real world example via the AVL tree. It’s all very basic testing until chapter three where the author gets into unit testing, which is probably the most useful method in my opinion, and he goes to prove it’s usefulness with examples of it’s use in different parts and stages of the development process. Later in the book the python mocker is used to separate unit sections, and then the actual unittest framework is discussed with more examples and a enough details that if you don’t understand it by then, you may never. By chapter six we are into the Nose app that drives the unittest, which is very useful of course.

The most useful part of the book comes toward the end where the author discusses and the walks through the method used to create a test-driven application and then even shows examples via the whole chapter dedicated towards making a testable web application frontend. Very impressive for such a quick read. Integration testing and System testing is also covered, thankfully. The final chapter covers some useful tools and techniques of which I particularly enjoyed the section on version control hooks. If you are not using version control in your development process you need to start now, as such the hooks for integration with the test framework are rather useful to know.

Overall this is a very nice book that discusses python application testing from the ground up. It’s perfect for a beginner or an intermediate python programmer that has little to no experience in automated testing methods. More advanced programmers that have already used these methods will probably not find the book too useful except for the last chapter that covers extra tools and techniques that they might not have seen before. If I didn’t have this book and needed to learn about python testing, it would be my first choice and my only recommendation so far. Well written and very useful.

If there is one thing I do not like about the book, it would be the reliance on the python CLI for running commands. I am a CLI kind of person and I keep lots of terminals open at the same time, so I prefer to write my code in an editor or IDE in one term tab, then switch to another and execute the script; I do not use the python command line to do much of anything. So following some of the steps in the book require that you follow the CLI method and that gets old for me. It’s a personal preference but one worth noting as there is a lot of it in the book. That’s the only thing I did not enjoy in a book that was otherwise basically perfect for the subject.

Event based programming vs threading by Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit and Eric Brewer

2010/04/15 by admin in Programming | 1 Comment

Saw this interesting paper about highly concurrent programming methods and figured the word should be spread! It’s not new material but it’s a good read. See the full article here: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/

“Highly concurrent applications such as Internet servers and transaction processing databases present a number of challenges to application designers. First, handling large numbers of concurrent tasks requires the use of scalable data structures. Second, these systems typically operate near maximum capacity, which creates resource contention and high sensitivity to scheduling decisions; overload must be handled with care to avoid thrashing. Finally, race conditions and subtle corner cases are common, which makes debugging and code maintenance difficult.

Threaded servers have historically failed to meet these challenges, leading many researchers to conclude that event-based programming is the best (or even only) way to achieve high performance in highly concurrent applications. “

Reviewed: Managing Software Development with SVN and Trac

2010/03/18 by admin in open source, Programming, Reviews | Leave a comment

I’ve recently been migrating my wiki/documentation for Kontrollbase to Trac. For those that are not aware, Trac is a web-based documentation/wiki/Subversion tool that is used by countless number of software projects. Subversion, of course, is a software collaboration and code management repository that manages branches/tags/trunk files with revision control. It’s one of the most heavily used open-source code repositories available. Given that I use SVN (subversion) for all of my software applications and am now using Trac, the book “Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion” by David J Murphy comes as a useful and great resource for integrating these two useful tools.

The book is not a thousand plus pages type of computer manual. It gets the important points out in a very readable and organized method without winding the user through overly extensive examples. What you get with this book is everything you need to know about combining SVN with Trac without the fluff of other manuals.

In regard to the application of this book, it fits several groups of users; managers that need to understand how their software development team is managing code – or wants to implement a more productive system for their software team, the software developers themselves that need to get up to speed on these most important of technologies, as well as up and coming technologists that want to learn about the code development and management process. Its well roundedness is one of the best features.

The content is broken up into several sections: content management basics, Trac and SVN basics, trac and svn setup and integration, documentation creation and management, code management, and then very useful appendixes for the actual install process of apache, SVN, and Trac. Each section has everything you need to get started and finished in quick order. The author is showing that the processes involved in code management do not have to be stressful or difficult to learn.

The author stresses several key ideas before getting into the meat of the content. These being “everything is a task”, “small steps are better”, “communication is key”, “content management is what software development requires for success.” Overall the two main division of labor is between task management and communication between team members.

Overall this is a very useful book on the subject of code management and documentation. I would recommend it to anyone looking to learn about the processes involved as well as anyone that wants a reference manual for growing their technology bookshelf.