Tiny Tweak: DTrace unless –disable-dtrace
The verdict is in: DTrace will be on by default.
This is a wildly different thing from saying “DTrace will be there”. No right-minded person would want to eschew the benefits of DTrace, the performance-analysis tool par excellence from Sun Microsystems for all varieties of Solaris operating systems. Even if you aren’t a Solaris user, I’d suggest you have a quick glance at the literature about it because it’s the concept that non-Sun folk will surely try to imitate someday. And who knows, maybe you’ll become a Solaris user just because of this. I’ve heard of a consultant in California who does Oracle gigs thus: he goes into the shop where they’re running (say) some other Unix variant, asks them to copy their data to a Solaris machine that he handily brings with him, and re-runs their problem queries with DTrace to find the bottlenecks.
But the controversy (if I can call it that) was over whether the standard MySQL builds would have DTrace hooks on “by default”, so that performance analysts wouldn’t have to recompile. That’s now been decided: yes it’s on by default. This naturally leads to the question of how ordinary users will be able to remove it, and that’s been decided too: they can recompile with a new option –disable-dtrace.
I suppose, judging from comments that happened on another issue, that somebody will think that decisions like these are due to the recent merging of Sun and MySQL. Wrong. The decision was strongly supported by people who were part of MySQL long before the merger.
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