The other day I was asked how much disk space a particular Kete project’s production database used. I didn’t have an answer, so I started searching for one.

In my case, the db software is MySQL and getting a report about various aspects of a db’s tables boils down to this query:

The output of this query has way more information than I need, plus to get the total number of bytes used you have to add all the values up anyway, so I decided to make a rake task to make this repeatable and return something succinct.

I have added the new rake task to the Kete app’s codebase. If you aren’t a Kete user, but need this functionality for your Ruby on Rails app, you can find it here:

http://svn.kete.net.nz/projects/kete/trunk/lib/tasks/db-disk-usage-report.rake

Note there is a formatting method taken from the Rails Helpers, I would love to not duplicate this definition. If anyone has a recommendation for the best way to pull this method into this rake task, I would appreciate it. Probably a simple include statement, but I didn’t get around to figuring out the correct incantation.

I would also love to hear how best to make this handle other database software, for example PostgreSQL, too.

Cheers,
Walter

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 10:26 am and is filed under kete development, open source, random, ruby on rails, sysadmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.