Introduction

In my travels to visit many customers over the last few years, I often see my customers creating many or all of their MySQL InnoDB tables using auto-increment primary keys. Many Object Relational Mappers do this by default on behalf of the user. Once the tables are all created with auto increment primary keys, then the database designer/developer goes about assigning alternate keys that they will actually use to access the data. Most of the time the auto-increment key is simply there to ensure that there is a unique key on the table and it’s often not used as an access path. This is a common design pattern, but is it the best way to create tables using MySQL? I am witting this blog to present the case that it’s a pretty bad idea most of the time.

Why it’s a bad Idea

There are four reasons why, which I will explain in some depth later in the post but for now, they are:

• Auto increment keys …

In this post we will see importance of replication related variables auto_increment_increment & auto_increment_offset with respect to MySQL Master Master setup. Consider we’ve already set a master-master replication. Now create…

The post MySQL Master Master Replication and auto_increment_increment / auto_increment_offset first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

In two words: online operations. In a paragraph: Forget partitioning, row-based replication and events. The big reasons most people are going to salivate over 5.1, and probably start plans to upgrade now, are the online operations:

• online ALTER TABLE for column rename, column default value change, and adding values to the end of an ENUM/SET
• Online, table-based logging. No more need to restart your server to enable or change the general or slow query logs. You can have the standard file-based output or choose a table format…which you can query.

(more…)