One thing I commonly hear when working with my clients is “I want to change my DDL strategy in order to avoid locking in my database! The last time I used the same old method I ended up in a metadata lock situation!”

I agree that metadata locks can be painful, but unfortunately, it’s completely unavoidable, and changing from one tool to another won’t help with this. That said, it’s still worth it to examine how metadata locks work and what the impact is for each of the common tools and processes. In doing so we will see that all these tools will require metadata locks, but knowing more about how they work and how the use locking can help us determine the right tool for your specific use case.

Any time you make a change to a table a metadata lock is needed to ensure consistency between the table itself and MySQL’s data dictionary. In order for MySQL to establish this lock it has to wait for any query against the table in …

A few weeks ago and in MySQL 5.7, I had an ALTER TABLE that failed with a duplicate entry error.  This is old news as it is happening since MySQL 5.6, but I only saw this recently because I am normally using online schema change from the Percona Toolkit (pt-osc) or GitHub's online schema migration (gh-ost).  I do not like that and I am disappointed this has not been improved, so this

Table space fragmentation has generally 2 origins :

• File System fragmentation : the data file is spread physically on many non contiguous locations on the disk.
• Internal Fragmentation : the data and index pages have “holes” : this happens when  rows are deleted or updated, especially at random.

As a result, performance is affected by table space fragmentation. Data typically takes more space on disk and in memory. The disk is more busy than it should.

File System fragmentation can be detected using the filefrag command on Linux (and similar on different OS). When using MyISAM, MYI files are usually very fragmented on the FS, much more than the MYD files.

ls -al frag
total 883304
drwx------  2 aadant common      4096 Sep 30 18:41 .
drwxr-xr-x 17 aadant common      4096 Sep 30 18:59 ..
-rw-rw----  1 aadant common …