I discovered a feature (or bug) of MySQL timestamp fields. Maybe is documented in some place what I not read yet:

When I add a new timestamp field to a table, MySQL magically adds some features to new timestamp field like a “trigger” and a default value to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.

There is test-case script:

-- CREATING TABLE AND INSERT SOME DUMMY DATA
mysql> CREATE TABLE t(
    -> id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
    -> val VARCHAR(50)
    -> );
Query OK, 0 ROWS affected (0.15 sec)
 
mysql> INSERT INTO t (val) VALUES ("foo") ,("var");
Query OK, 2 ROWS affected (0.08 sec)
Records: 2  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
 
mysql> SELECT * FROM t;
+----+------+
| id | val  |
+----+------+
|  1 | foo  |
|  2 | var  |
+----+------+
2

I was tired to get manually disk space used for all MySQL databases, I just created a stored procedure to get an overview of the database sizes in our MySQL server.

MySQL don’t have a command that allows us an overall summary of the databases, something like SHOW TABLE STATUS for databases. The “SHOW DATABASES” command lists only the current databases without any other information like how many space are using or how many tables there are, etc.

The procedure that I wrote this based on INFORMATION_SCHEMA database, which contains rich information of all existing databases.

I suggest, in a previous post, place all these procedures in a database called tools, but you can still choose different location.

So when call the procedure will have a global view of information that will be useful for maintenance tasks.

I write a fair number of scripts on this site and have posted a lot of code over the years. Generally if I am not pasting the code to be viewed on the webpage then I link to a file that a user can download; which leads to a lot of mish-mash code that doesn’t have a home. I’ve always kept the code files in a private SVN repo over the years but have recently moved them all to BitBucket Git repositories. So here they are: lots of code samples and useful bits of programming to save time.

Generic Shell Scripts: https://bitbucket.org/themattreid/generic-bash-scripts/src
Generic Python Scripts: https://bitbucket.org/themattreid/generic-python-scripts/src
Generic MySQL Stored Procs:

If you’ve ever been troubleshooting on the MySQL command line and needed to quickly see how much memory is being used then you’ve probably noticed that there are no built in commands to give you this data. Unlike other enterprise databases MySQL doesn’t have a very robust management system built in to help make the DBA’s life easier. It doesn’t come with built in Stored Procedures to report on usage statistics or generate handy reports; so we have to code them and import them to MySQL — no relying on Oracle to help us out here.

So, here’s a stored procedure that can be imported to MySQL and run whenever you need to see the memory usage statistics. Installation and usage info is built into the SP below. The SP can also be downloaded from the repo:

The auto_increment for MySQL fields are very useful but what about if I need a custom auto-increment like a custom format like 001-000033,

001-000034
001-000035
001-000036
...

To make it possible we have an option based on past article MySQL Sequences:

CREATE TABLE _sequence
(
    seq_name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
    seq_group VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL,
    seq_val INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL
);

delimiter //
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS getNextCustomSeq//
CREATE FUNCTION getNextCustomSeq
(
    sSeqName VARCHAR(50),
    sSeqGroup VARCHAR(10)
) RETURNS

From command line we have the entire MySQL server on hands (if we have privileges too of course) but we don’t have a overall overview, at this point the show table status command is every useful, or not?.

This is what we get when run show table status in a standard 80×25 terminal screen:

We can maximize the terminal window and decrease font size, but not all the time we need that lots of info. Some time ago I develop a stored procedure to get a global overview including functions and stored procedures. The result is pretty comprehensible:

call tools.sp_status(database());

Sometimes we have some special need for a stored procedure to call another to do something. That is fine, but what if the second stored proc failed for some reason? Maybe you want to halt the first stored procedure (the caller) and not proceed with the work until the problem is verified and resolved. So How do you do it?

Simple, get a return code from the called procedure to determine if it worked or not!

Here’s a sample piece of code to explain better:


DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS `test`.`testing123`;
DELIMITER $$

Lets paint the picture:

Scenario part 1 : Migrating a couple thousand stored procedures from database technology X to mysql
Scenario part 2 : Legacy system where the people who wrote it left a long time ago
Scenario part 3 : Developers sure can get real creative and invent all kinds of ways to get data (eg: having a stored proc which formulates a big query using concat after going through a bunch of conditions (fair enough), BUT the parts making up the different queries are stored in a table on a database rather than within the stored proc itself) … talk about KIS – Keep it simple!!
Scenario part 4 : This stored proc references 18 tables, 4 views, and another two stored procedures on 5 databases

Now close your eyes and try to imagine that for a few seconds, nah kidding don’t want you to hurt

One common question I get is how to use partitioning instead of MERGE tables. The process I use involves using stored procedures to create and drop partitions. This article will go over the stored procedures I use; special thanks to Roland Bouman for taking a look and giving great feedback to optimize this process.

First, a simple table, not partitioned (yet):

use test;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS my_part;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS my_part (
  id int NOT NULL,
  creationDate datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (id,creationDate)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

In real, life there is more to the table than just id and creationDate. The most important part is that the partitioned field(s) need to be part of the primary key.

Now, add the partition definition. This can be done in the

+-----------+
| RESULT    |
+-----------+
| 0x199c610 |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0 sec)

+--------+
| result |
+--------+
| done   |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

+--------------+
| result       |

Previously, in “Thoughts on Thoughts on Drizzle” I theorized that one of the major reasons why we did not see lots of people jumping at stored procedures in MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) was that it wasn’t in their native language (for lack of a better term). We’ve seen External Language Stored Procedures for MySQL that let you write stored procedures in some other languages…. but I felt something was missing.

Firstly, I wanted a language I was really familiar with and comfortable writing complex things in.

Secondly, it should be compiled so that it runs as fast as possible.

Thirdly, it shouldn’t just be linking to a pre-compiled

Looking for instances particular column in a large schema can be a pain. Fortunately the information schema makes this pretty easy, if your columns have a consistent naming convention.

SELECT table_schema, table_name, column_name
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE column_name LIKE '%some_name%';

Now, if we want to wrap this up into an easy to use stored procedure, we can do something like this:

drop procedure find_column;
delimiter //
CREATE PROCEDURE find_column(c varchar(255))
begin
	SET @a = CONCAT("%", c, "%");
	SELECT table_schema, table_name, column_name, column_type
		FROM information_schema.columns
		WHERE column_name LIKE @a;
end
//
delimiter ;

We need to use the concat statement in order to

It”s not the most common task in the world, but you might want to view processes from a particular user and once in a while you might even need to kill processes from a single user, be it during an attack or because you simply got a bug in an application bombarding your db server with connections!

Here is a small stored procedure which does exactly that!

call process_list("show","username","hostname");

– shows all processes owned by username@hostname

call process_list("kill","username","hostname");

– kills all processes owned by username@hostname

The code for this stored procedure can be found below. If you have any comments / suggestions feel free to comment below.