Maatkit tools try to make complicated tasks simpler and more reliable. Most of these tasks involve something like gluing together difficult commands inside MySQL. Most of the tools try to do something useful by default. Some of them are only for advanced power users who really know what they’re doing. All of the tools go to great lengths to be careful and safe with your data, sometimes to the point that users think there’s a bug when they’re really seeing unexpected behavior that protects them from some obscure problem they didn’t think of.
via maatkit.org