Comments on: PROCEDURE ANALYSE

By: JuksWebGuy

JuksWebGuy — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:19:58 +0000

This topic is useful, I learned from it.

By: Shlomi Noach

Shlomi Noach — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:39:34 +0000

@Robert

I think it’s a good opportunity to remind that sql_mode had best been set to ‘TRADITIONAL’ or otherwise strict mode, so that when attempting to INSERT texts *longer* than column width – an error is thrown (instead of silent truncation)

By: Robert Stewart

Robert Stewart — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:04:10 +0000

The Max_length field in the analyse() output is also very useful, as Shlomi indicates, for detecting if a varchar column is too narrow. I had created a column in a table to store names provided by a customer, and I thought I had made it sufficiently wide to handle the data they said they would be loading. While doing some maintenance I decided to run analyse() and discovered they had recently starting adding some entities with names that were only one character shorter than the maximum size. This allowed me to alter the table in off hours rather than during the middle of the day when they expanded the names further and INSERTs suddenly started failing.

Of course, this issue jumped out at me only because I knew all the column widths. A tool that combines both bits of info is indeed useful.

By: peter

peter — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:45:07 +0000

Shlimi,

No this is quite fine

By: Shlomi Noach

Shlomi Noach — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:49:08 +0000

Peter.

Indeed. PROCEDURE ANALYSE() is a helpful utility. Sorry if I appear to do too much “marketing” for my toolkit.

By: peter

peter — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:37:27 +0000

Shlomi,

Right. It is just something build in which make it nice. Thank for the link.

By: Milos

Milos — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:35:46 +0000

Nice, real nice.
Both of you.

By: Shlomi Noach

Shlomi Noach — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:38:11 +0000

One thing that is really missing from the output is the *current* data type, and how far I am from exceeding it.
I’m developing a utility which will roughly act like PROCEDURE ANALYSE(), but will rather let you know you capacity percentage.

So far, it only supports AUTO_INCREMENT columns – and let’s you know how far you are from running out of space. You can ask it to only show you columns which are more than, say, 60% used. For example, a TINYINT column with a value of 200 will show in the output.

I’ll be adding other issues, such as used char-length etc. It does not come to replace PROCEDURE ANALYZE (it does not recommend data types) but rather give you an overall look on “what’s my status right now: am I running out of numbers? Am I running out of text length?”

Find it here: oak-show-limits. Again, it’s quite limited now, but work in ongoing.