I had a lot of questions on my MySQL Indexing: Best Practices Webinar (both recording and slides are available now) We had lots of questions. I did not have time to answer some and others are better answered in writing anyway. Q: One developer on our team wants to replace longish (25-30) indexed varchars with [...]
Innodb row size limitation
I recently worked on a customer case where at seemingly random times, inserts would fail with Innodb error 139. This is a rather simple problem, but due to it’s nature, it may only affect you after you already have a system running in production for a while.
Be careful when joining on CONCAT
The other day I had a case with an awful performance of a rather simple join. It was a join on tb1.vid = CONCAT(‘prefix-’, tb2.id) with tb1.vid – indexed varchar(100) and tb2.id – int(11) column. No matter what I did – forced it to use key, forced a different join order, it did not want [...]
GROUP_CONCAT useful GROUP BY extension
MySQL has useful extention to the GROUP BY operation: function GROUP_CONCAT: GROUP_CONCAT(expr) – This function returns a string result with the concatenated non-NULL values from a group. Where it can be useful?
Handling big result sets
Sometime it is needed to handle a lot of rows on client side. Usual way is send query via mysql_query and than handle the result in loop mysql_fetch_array (here I use PHP functions but they are common or similar for all APIs, including C). Consider table:
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 41 42 43 44 45 | CREATE TABLE `longf` ( `f1` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `f2` date default NULL, `f3` date default NULL, `f4` varchar(14) default NULL, `f5` varchar(6) default NULL, `f6` date default NULL, `f7` smallint(6) default NULL, `f8` smallint(6) default NULL, `f9` varchar(13) default NULL, `f10` varchar(39) default NULL, `f11` int(11) default NULL, `f12` float default NULL, `f13` int(11) default NULL, `f14` smallint(6) default NULL, `f15` varchar(39) default NULL, `f16` date default NULL, `f17` smallint(6) default NULL, `f18` int(11) NOT NULL, `f19` date default NULL, `f20` date default NULL, `f21` varchar(14) default NULL, `f22` varchar(6) default NULL, `f23` date default NULL, `f24` smallint(6) default NULL, `f25` smallint(6) default NULL, `f26` varchar(13) default NULL, `f27` varchar(39) default NULL, `f28` int(11) default NULL, `f29` float default NULL, `f30` int(11) default NULL, `f31` smallint(6) default NULL, `f32` varchar(39) default NULL, `f33` date default NULL, `f34` smallint(6) default NULL, `f35` int(11) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`f1`) ); select count(*) from longf; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 5242880 | +----------+ |
INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE and summary counters.
INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE is very powerful but often forgotten MySQL feature. It was introduced in MySQL 4.1 but I still constantly see people unaware of it. Myself I like this feature big deal because it is designed in truly MySQL style – very efficient solution for freqent task while keeping it beautiful [...]

