I recently worked through an issue with a client trying to detect data drift across some servers that were located in different timezones. Unfortunately, several of the tables had timestamp fields and were set to a default value of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. From the manual, here is how MySQL handles timezone locality with timestamp fields: Values for TIMESTAMP columns are [...]
Recovery after DROP & CREATE
In a very popular data loss scenario a table is dropped and empty one is created with the same name. This is because mysqldump in many cases generates the “DROP TABLE” instruction before the “CREATE TABLE”:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `actor`; /*!40101 SET @saved_cs_client = @@character_set_client */; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = utf8 */; CREATE TABLE `actor` ( `actor_id` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `first_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, `last_name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, `last_update` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, PRIMARY KEY (`actor_id`), KEY `idx_actor_last_name` (`last_name`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=201 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; /*!40101 SET character_set_client = @saved_cs_client */; |
If there were no subsequent CREATE TABLE the recovery would be trivial. Index_id of the PRIMARY index of [...]
Connecting orphaned .ibd files
There are two ways InnoDB can organize tablespaces. First is when all data, indexes and system buffers are stored in a single tablespace. This is typicaly one or several ibdata files. A well known innodb_file_per_table option brings the second one. Tables and system areas are split into different files. Usually system tablespace is located in [...]
Joining on range? Wrong!
The problem I am going to describe is likely to be around since the very beginning of MySQL, however unless you carefully analyse and profile your queries, it might easily go unnoticed. I used it as one of the examples in our talk given at phpDay.it conference last week to demonstrate some pitfalls one may [...]
Statistics of InnoDB tables and indexes available in xtrabackup
If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB … you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR – since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite [...]
Testing InnoDB “Barracuda” format with compression
New features of InnoDB – compression format and fast index creation sound so promising so I spent some time to research time and sizes on data we have on our production. The schema of one of shards is
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 | CREATE TABLE `article87` ( `id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL, `ext_key` varchar(32) NOT NULL, `site_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `forum_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `thread_id` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET latin1 NOT NULL, `published` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `crawled` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `subject` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `url` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `num_links` smallint(6) NOT NULL, `links_in` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `cache_author` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `cache_site` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, `anchor` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `isthread` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `author_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL, `inserted` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, `fromfile` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `language_id` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `encoding` varchar(255) NOT NULL, `warning` mediumtext NOT NULL, `is_thread_start` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL, `source` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL, `hash` char(32) NOT NULL, `mod_is` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `is_adult` tinyint(3) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `bodyuc` mediumtext NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `ext_key` (`ext_key`), KEY `forum_id` (`forum_id`,`thread_id`,`published`), KEY `site_id` (`site_id`,`published`), KEY `hash` (`hash`), KEY `forum_id_2` (`forum_id`,`is_thread_start`,`published`), KEY `published` (`published`), KEY `inserted` (`inserted`), KEY `forum_id_3` (`forum_id`,`thread_id`,`is_thread_start`), KEY `site_id_2` (`site_id`,`author_id`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; |
Long PRIMARY KEY for Innodb tables
I’ve written and spoke a lot about using short PRIMARY KEYs with Innodb tables due to the fact all other key will refer to the rows by primary key. I also recommended to use sequential primary keys so you do not end up having random primary key BTREE updates which can be very expensive. Today [...]

