Too many SQL variables exception in Graphite with SQLite3

Jul 4, 2013

Having run Graphite for a while, today I found a rather annoying issue. We were using events, and everything was working perfectly fine so far. But for the 24 last hours, the graph was blank.

Actually, in the dashboard, the graph was missing, being displayed as a gray box. Enabling the web inspector in Google Chrome I got the graph URL. Opening the link in a new tab gave me the exception message: too many SQL variables (¹).

After some research, I found out this was a bug in SQLite. After trying to hack the code, and being concerned about using a patched version of Graphite and having to update it later, I decided to switch database.

But to avoid losing the graphs, users and other settings, including the events, I migrated the SQLite database to a MySQL server. This MySQL server was already installed in the server machine, since this machine hosted a Zabbix server too.

Here are the steps required to migrate your database from SQLite to MySQL (²).

Download sqlite3_mysql python script from http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/12793
Stop Apache/Nginx
mysql -u user -p -e “create database redmine graphite set utf8;”
sqlite3 graphite.db .dump | sqlite3-to-mysql.py | mysql -uroot -pyourpass graphite
Start Apache again

After tail’ing the Graphite webapp log file,

tail f- storage/log/webapp/error.log

I noticed the Python MySQLdb wasn’t installed.

ImproperlyConfigured: Error loading MySQLdb module: No module named MySQLdb

My server was an Ubuntu 13.04, so I installed the module simply with the following command.

apt-get install python-mysqldb

Hope that helps!

¹ You may have to enable *DEBUG* in your Django settings for seeing the exception in your browser

² Zabbix needed some minor tweaks in order to use [MariaDB](https://mariadb.org/), but probably you can give it a try too

Categories: Blog

Tags: Monitoring, Python