Over at the Drizzle blog, the recent 2010-06-07 tarball was announced. This tarball release has my fixes for the ENUM type, so that it now works as it should. I was quite amazed that such a small block of code could have so many bugs! One of the most interesting was the documented limit we inherited from MySQL (see the MySQL Docs on ENUM) of a maximum of 65,535 elements for an ENUM column.

This all started out from a quite innocent comment of Jay‘s in a code review for adding support for the ENUM data type to the embedded_innodb engine. It was all pretty innocent… saying that I should use a constant instead of the magic 0×10000 number as a limit …

4 min 20 sec

So next time somebody complains about NDB taking a long time in CREATE TABLE, you’re welcome to point them to this :)

• A single CREATE TABLE statement
• It had ONE column
• It was an ENUM column.
• With 70,000 possible values.
• It was 605kb of SQL.
• It ran on Drizzle

This was to test if you could create an ENUM column with greater than 216 possible values (you’re not supposed to be able to) – bug 589031 has been filed.

How does it compare to MySQL? Well… there are other problems (Bug 54194 – ENUM limit of 65535 elements isn’t true filed). Since we don’t have any limitations in Drizzle due to the FRM file …

It is the first time I am going to write something serious after registering this domain. Probably I was too lazy to blog or I was working hard that I had no time to write blogs.

Any way I have decided to break the silence

Today I came across a problem where I had to add a new value to an enum column in a table with a few million rows. The traditional method of getting that done will take ages to finish and I could not afford to have a such a long window. Fortunately for me I was dealing with a MyISAM table and I had a dirty trick in mind ]:< .

I will list out a small example showing how I did it:

Suppose my table is

create table a( id int,
choice enum('agree','disagree')
)Engine=MyISAM

and I want add a new choice ‘ Don’t care’ what I will do is , I will create a new table …