MySQL Support Blogs

MySQL Support was represented at Oracle OpenWorld 2016 with two engineers: Ligaya Turmelle and Jesper Krogh. We did a total of four talks and spend 20 some hours in total at the Support Stars Bar. We would like to thank all of you who attended. It was good meeting some of you and talk about your experiences - both good and not so good - using MySQL.

If you attended one of our talks and would like to study some of the slides in more details - or you were not able to attend, all of our presentations are available from the Oracle OpenWorld content catalogue (except the Support Stars Bar mini briefing which is available from this blog):

• MySQL DBA Primer [TUT1718]
• …

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A customer showed that a particular client reported a less-than-helpful error message when it tried to display some meta-data about a table.

I couldn't repeat the behavior with just a copy of the schema, so I suspected it was because of the size of data in the customer's server - somebody had used an int where they needed a long.

The customer's data was quite large - many hundreds of GB - more than I could …

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There is not yet an equivalent to GROUP_CONCAT that produces a JSON array. (There is in MySQL 8, but that's not GA yet.) Until then, you can hack it together with string functions:

SELECT * FROM t;
+------+--------+
| id   | data   |
+------+--------+
|    1 | First  |
|    2 | Second |
+------+--------+

SELECT CONCAT('[', GROUP_CONCAT(JSON_OBJECT('id', id, 'value', data) SEPARATOR ', '), ']') AS j FROM t;
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| j                                                           |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| [{"id": 1, "value": "First"}, {"id": 2, "value": "Second"}] |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Or you can use all JSON functions but hack the grouping:

SELECT j FROM (
       SELECT
         @c := @c + 1 AS c, …

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It is soon time for the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. This year it takes place from 18 to 22 September. There will be a wide range of talks about MySQL and other Oracle products with speakers including Oracle developers, product management, Support, customers, and community members. So there should be something for everyone.

MySQL Support will have two talks this year:

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I worked on an issue last recently where a query was too slow when executed in MySQL Cluster. The issue was that Cluster has some restrictions when it comes to push down conditions.

As an example of this, consider the following query using the employees sample database. The query takes a look at the average salary based on how many years the employee has been with the company. As the latest hire date in the database is in January 2000, the query uses 1 February 2000 as the reference date.

Initially the query performs like (performance is with two data nodes and all nodes in the same virtual machine on a laptop, so the timings are not necessarily representative of a production system, though the improvements should be repeatable):

mysql> SELECT FLOOR(DATEDIFF('2000-02-01', hire_date)/365) AS LengthOfService,
              COUNT(DISTINCT employees.emp_no) AS NoEmployees, AVG(salary) AS AvgSalary
         FROM salaries
              STRAIGHT_JOIN …

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Workbench announced support for a spatial view in 6.2, but examples are somewhat lacking. Just how do you get a SHP into MySQL?

Download and unpack a SHP file such as these country boundaries.

In the Workbench installation directory, you'll find a program "ogr2ogr" that can convert .shp to .csv. Run it like this:

"C:\Program …

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MySQL 5.7 came out with support for JSON, improved geometry, and virtual columns. Here's an example showing them all playing together.

Download citylots.json.

It comes as one big object, so we'll break it up into separate lines:
grep "^{ .type" citylots.json > properties.json

Connect to a 5.7 instance of MySQL.

CREATE TABLE citylots (id …

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Hi!

Thanks everyone who attended the hands-on lab session on MySQL Cluster at Oracle OpenWorld today.

The following are the links for the slides, the HOL instructions, and the HOL extra instructions.

Will try to summarize the HOL session below.

Aim of the HOL was to help attendees to familiarize with MySQL Cluster. In particular, by:

1. Learning the basics of MySQL Cluster Architecture
2. Learning the basics of MySQL Cluster Configuration and Administration
3. Learning how to start a new Cluster for evaluation purposes and …

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mysql < quarto.sql

Example game play:

mysql> -- Start the game and pass the first piece in the lower nibble
mysql> CALL SetupGame(0x0A);
-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| rules                                                                |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Quarto: 4 in a line (row, column, or long diagonal) with at least one bit in common wins.
CALL Play(move); -- high 4 bits are board position, low 4 bits are piece for next player
CALL PrintBoard(base); -- to display the board. Useful bases are 16 and 2. |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

+------------------------+
| instructions           |
+------------------------+
| Player 1, play piece A |
+------------------------+

mysql> CALL Play(0x00);
+---------+
| board   |
+---------+ …

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Because somebody asked for it on Freenode:

CREATE FUNCTION DATE_TRUNC(field ENUM('microsecond', 'millisecond', 'second', 'minute', 'hour', 'day', 'week', 'month', 'quarter', 'year', 'decade', 'century', 'millennium'), source datetime(6))
RETURNS datetime(6)
DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
  IF field IN ('millisecond') THEN SET source = source - INTERVAL MICROSECOND(source) % 1000 MICROSECOND; END IF;
  IF field NOT IN ('microsecond', 'millisecond') THEN SET source = source - INTERVAL MICROSECOND(source) MICROSECOND; END IF;
  IF field NOT IN ('microsecond', 'millisecond', 'second') THEN SET source = source - INTERVAL SECOND(source) SECOND; END IF;
  IF field NOT IN ('microsecond', 'millisecond', 'second', 'minute') THEN SET source = source - INTERVAL MINUTE(source) MINUTE; END IF;
  IF field NOT IN ('microsecond', 'millisecond', 'second', 'minute', 'hour') THEN SET source = source - INTERVAL HOUR(source) HOUR; END IF;
  IF field NOT IN ('microsecond', 'millisecond', …

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Hi!

I'm speaking at Oracle Open World this October 29th (Thursday). My Session is a hands-on lab session: HOL3348 on MySQL Cluster.

If you are interested in familiarize a bit with MySQL Cluster this is definitely a session for you.

I will start by briefly introducing MySQL Cluster and its Architecture.

Then I will guide you through the needed steps to:

• Install a local MySQL Cluster
• Start MySQL Cluster
• Connect to MySQL Cluster (using the command line)
• Ways to monitor MySQL Cluster …

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CREATE FUNCTION SWAP_ENDIAN(inString text)
RETURNS TEXT
DETERMINISTIC
-- Expects a hex string: AbCdEf
-- Returns the string swapped for endianness: EfCdAb

BEGIN
  DECLARE position INT DEFAULT 1;
  DECLARE holder TEXT DEFAULT '';

  WHILE position 

So you can do things like:

SELECT
  FROM_UNIXTIME(
    CONV(
      SWAP_ENDIAN(
        SUBSTRING(
          HEX(
            FROM_BASE64(
              'Yk3XVQ8pAAAAZgAAAGoAAAAAAAQANS4xLjczLWxvZwAAAAAABBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA'
              'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABiTddVEzgNAAgAEgAEBAQEEgAAUwAEGggAAAAICAgC'
            )
          ), 1, 8
        )
      ), 16, 10)
  ) AS event_timestamp;

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and without creating a table to pass the state around (really just an excuse to use the named locks feature).

DELIMITER //
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS SET_BREAKPOINT//
CREATE FUNCTION SET_BREAKPOINT()
RETURNS tinyint
NO SQL
BEGIN
        -- Acquire lock 1
        -- Wait until lock 2 is taken to signal that we may continue
        DO GET_LOCK(CONCAT('lock_1_', CONNECTION_ID()), -1);
        REPEAT
                DO 1;
        UNTIL IS_USED_LOCK(CONCAT('lock_2_', CONNECTION_ID())) END REPEAT;
        DO RELEASE_LOCK(CONCAT('lock_1_', CONNECTION_ID()));

        -- Acquire lock 3 to acknowledge message to continue.
        -- Wait for lock 2 to be released as signal of receipt.
        DO GET_LOCK(CONCAT('lock_3_', CONNECTION_ID()), -1);
        REPEAT
                DO 1;
        UNTIL IS_FREE_LOCK(CONCAT('lock_2_', CONNECTION_ID())) END REPEAT;
        DO RELEASE_LOCK(CONCAT('lock_3_', CONNECTION_ID()));

        RETURN 1;
END//

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS NEXT_BREAKPOINT//
CREATE FUNCTION NEXT_BREAKPOINT(connection_id int)
RETURNS tinyint
NO SQL
BEGIN
        -- Acquire …

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Sometimes replication halts with an error like:

Slave I/O: Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from binary log
Error reading packet from server: log event entry exceeded max_allowed_packet; Increase max_allowed_packet on master;

If it's the SQL thread instead of the I/O thread, it might complain about 'Event too big'. The error could also be the other direction, complaining of 'Event too small'.

I rarely see this error actually have anything to do with max_allowed_packet. You can check the largest event in the master's binary log file. Even though the binary log records the length in each entry, mysqlbinlog doesn't expose it, so we have to do the math ourselves:

mysqlbinlog mysql-bin.00XXX | gawk "/^# at / { diff = $3 - prev; prev = $3; } (diff > max) { max = diff } END {print max}" -

If the result is larger than max_allowed_packet, then the problem and solution are exactly what the the error message says. …

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Can you use the binary logs to undo a DELETE? Maybe, if you're using ROW format logging. The difference between a delete and an insert event could be just one byte - the one that maps it as a DELETE_ROWS_EVENT or a WRITE_ROWS_EVENT. Let's try it.

I've already populated this table with a few rows:

CREATE TABLE `undo_test` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`t` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
`v` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL,
`b` blob,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

Save a hash so we can see if the undo really works later:

mysql -e "SELECT * FROM test.undo_test" | md5sum > before.md5

Delete an unwanted row:

DELETE FROM undo_test;
Query OK, 1693 rows affected (0.14 sec)

Oops! Forgot the WHERE clause! And of course I don't have any recent backups. Is the data really gone?

mysql> select …

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Time for another quiz to impress your friends, if you have that kind of friends.

The manual page in question

mysql --skip-enable-disable-column-names=0 -e "select 1"
mysql --skip-disable-enable-column-names=0 -e "select 1"
mysql --loose-disable-enable-skip-column-names=0 -e "select 1"

What's the result? An error about unknown options? A warning? Column headers enabled? Disabled?

Answer ▼

mysql --skip-enable-disable-column-names=0 -e "select 1"
+---+
| 1 |
+---+
| 1 |
+---+

mysql --skip-disable-enable-column-names=0 -e "select 1"
+---+
| 1 |
+---+

mysql --loose-disable-enable-skip-column-names=0 -e "select 1"
mysql: option '--skip-column-names' cannot take an argument

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It dawned on me that most folks are using the Installer these days.

As I need quick access to every MySQL version,  using an Installer is never an option.
And for folks wanting 100% control over their setups, they may not want an installer doing things.

So this shows how to setup an instance manually.

1. download non-installer .zip version from dev.mysql.com
2. create a directory c:\mysql and c:\mysql\tmp
3. unzip the .zip into c:\mysql
4. move the data directory into c:\mysql for easier future upgrades
5. create a basic my.ini
6. install the service
7. start the service

Here I'll show each step with more detail.   I purposely leave out things like post-installation security, to keep it simple.
1.  Create a directory.Decide where you will put the installation and datadir.  I use c:\mysql and c:\mysql\datasince I truly despise the "windows way" with …

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In MySQL 5.5 metadata locks were introduced to ensure consistency for some operations that previously could cause problems. For example if a transaction SELECTed from a table and another connection changed the structure of the table before the transaction was committed; in that case the two operations would be written in reverse order to the binary log which could prevent replaying the binary log.

However there was no way to see who held metadata locks. SHOW PROCESSLIST would show who were waiting for metadata locks, and often you could guess who held it, but it wasn’t so always. Consider for example the following:

mysql> SELECT Id, db, Command, Time, State, Info FROM information_schema.PROCESSLIST; …

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MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) is the monitoring solution offered as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition and MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition. In this blog, I will not go into details of the features of MEM, but rather focus on the case where you want to install MEM 3.0 to try it out on your personal desktop or laptop.

A trial version (the full product, but the can only be used for 30 days) is available from Oracle’s Software Delivery Cloud. If you are a MySQL customer, it is recommended that you download MEM from My Oracle Support (MOS).

Once you have downloaded and extracted the installation binaries, you can start the installation. You have the choice between …

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During my talk and hands on labs at MySQL Connect 2013 I used several views, functions, and procedures from ps_helper and ps_tools.

The slides from the two talks can be downloaded from Thanks For Attending MySQL Connect or from the MySQL Connect 2013 Content Catalogue.

You can read more about ps_helper on Mark Leith’s blog and you can download ps_helper from github.

…

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