MySQL reads / writes per table I am optimising our DB. Essentially I am trying to find the most written and the most read tables in our db. After that I will follow by sym-linking those tables into separate drives.

Is there a way of following each tables activity ?
As in follow IOPS, writes, reads per table ?
Method 1

If you are using Percona Server or MariaDB (>= 5.2), you can simply set the userstat/userstat_running variable to enable a bunch of new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables including one called TABLE_STATISTICS that provides exactly this information.

For example:

mysql&gt; SELECT TABLE_NAME, ROWS_READ, ROWS_CHANGED, ROWS_CHANGED_X_INDEXES FROM TABLE_STATISTICS ORDER BY ROWS_CHANGED DESC LIMIT 5;
+-------------------+------------+--------------+------------------------+
| TABLE_NAME        | ROWS_READ  | ROWS_CHANGED | ROWS_CHANGED_X_INDEXES |
+-------------------+------------+--------------+------------------------+
| user              |   21122527 |      5989231 |               23956924 |
| audit             |       1208 |      5020929 |               20083716 |
| sometemp          |   13995426 |      3182150 |                9546450 |
| creditcards       |    3566482 |      2998976 |               11995904 |
| order             | 2147483647 |      2662606 |               53252120 |
+-------------------+------------+--------------+------------------------+


ROWS_CHANGED would correspond to the most written to tables and ROWS_READ would be the most read from.  You should also look at INDEX_STATISTICS to find your most and least used indexes.

See also the MariaDB user statistics documentation.

Method 2

If you are not using Percona Server, you could use pt-query-digest to capture a sample of your queries and then filter out only INSERT/UPDATE/DELETEs.  That would look something like this:

mysql&gt; SELECT @@GLOBAL.slow_query_log_file;
+------------------------------------------+
| @@GLOBAL.slow_query_log_file             |
+------------------------------------------+
| /var/logs/mysql/slowquery.log            |
+------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql&gt; SET GLOBAL slow_query_log_file='/tmp/allqueries.log';
mysql&gt; SELECT @@GLOBAL.long_query_time;
+--------------------------+
| @@GLOBAL.long_query_time |
+--------------------------+
|                 0.250000 |
+--------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql&gt; SET GLOBAL long_query_time = 0;
mysql&gt; FLUSH LOGS;
mysql&gt; SLEEP 600; SET GLOBAL long_query_time = 0.25; SET GLOBAL slow_query_log_file='/var/logs/mysql/slowquery.log'; FLUSH LOGS;


Now you have a file, /tmp/allqueries.log that contains every query executed on your server for ~10 minutes.

Next, analyze it with pt-query-digest to get the most frequently written to tables:

pt-query-digest /tmp/allqueries.log --group-by=distill --filter '$event-&gt;{arg} =~ m/^(update|delete|insert)/i' --limit 5 &gt; /tmp/writes.txt


If you examine /tmp/writes.txt, you will see a section near the top that looks like this:

# Profile
# Rank Query ID Response time Calls R/Call Apdx V/M   Item
# ==== ======== ============= ===== ====== ==== ===== ====================
#    1 0x        0.0558 26.8%   282 0.0002 1.00  0.00 INSERT UPDATE user
#    2 0x        0.0448 21.5%   246 0.0002 1.00  0.00 UPDATE audit
#    3 0x        0.0228 10.9%    11 0.0021 1.00  0.00 UPDATE sometemp
#    4 0x        0.0108  5.2%    16 0.0007 1.00  0.00 UPDATE creditcards
#    5 0x        0.0103  4.9%    43 0.0002 1.00  0.00 UPDATE order


Roughly, these are your most written to tables for the duration of the sample you chose.  To get the most read from tables (roughly), you can change the --filter parameter to --filter '$event-&gt;{arg} =~ m/^select/i' and you will see similar output.

If you are only interested in writes, you can pass a binary log into pt-query-digest and get similar results:

mysqlbinlog mysql-bin.000511 | pt-query-digest --type=binlog --group-by=distill &gt; /tmp/writes.txt


You can also get the same data with tcpdump and pt-query-digest --type=tcpdump

So, this being said, assuming that you are using InnoDB tables, I highly doubt that you will see much performance benefit from doing this at all.  Because of the way data is buffered to the InnoDB log and then written to disk, I wouldn't expect much or any performance gain from moving individual tables around like this.  You might see some benefit from moving the InnoDB log files themselves to separate, faster disk to separate the log read/writes from the tablespace read/writes, but even that is questionable.  Investing in fast, high quality RAID arrays with a battery backed cache (or better yet, SSD) will be a better use of your resources.