Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col), it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just use what they happen to like, while there is a substantial difference in performance and even query results. Also, we find a difference in execution on InnoDB and MyISAM engines.

NOTE: All tests were applied for MySQL version 8.0.30, and in the background, I ran every query three to five times to make sure that all of them were fully cached in the buffer pool (for InnoDB) or by the filesystem (for MyISAM).

Count function for Innodb engine:

Let’s have look at the following series of examples for InnoDB engine:

CREATE TABLE count_innodb (
  id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  val_with_nulls int(11) default NULL,
  val_no_null int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY idx (id)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

(mysql) > select count(*) from count_innodb; …

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In OpenLampTech issue #60, we are looking at some fantastic articles covering:

• Laravel Eloquent and Query Builder tips
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Want to help OpenLampTech be a success …

If you have data stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database and you want to import it into MySQL HeatWave Database Service in OCI, you can use the procedure described in this article.

There are several ways you can try to speed up a MySQL replica. Here are some ideas:

What is MySQL InnoDB Redo Log Archiving ? How does it work ? Discover this important MySQL InnoDB feature reading this blog post.

Live Migration from Azure Database for MySQL to MySQL HeatWave Database Service on Oracle Cloud (OCI)

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Space constraint has been an endless and painstaking process for many of us, especially in systems that have a high number of transactions and data growth exceeding hundreds of GBs in a matter of days. In this blog, I will share a solution to remove this space and remove rows from tables in a few seconds regardless of the size of a table without causing any additional load on the database using table partitions.

The first approach that comes to anyone’s mind for deleting the row is using a DELETE query in SQL. Suppose, one wants to delete rows from a table that are older than one year—the query for such operations would be like this:

DELETE FROM salaries WHERE from_date <DATE_SUB(NOW(),INTERVAL 1 YEAR);

The above query is pretty straightforward but there are a few caveats:

• Server business will grow exponentially and could impact the usual traffic on the server.
• To speed up the above query …

Recently, we performed a database engine major version upgrade in one of our customers’ environments from MySQL 5.7.26 to 8.0.27. After this version upgrade, we experienced issues with backups and replication for one of the nodes.

In this article, I will explain these issues in detail and recommend a way to take backups from a replication environment.

To begin with, we upgraded all the database nodes from 5.7.26 to 8.0.27 and as a recommended way we have a backup set-up from one of the replica nodes. Physical backups are being taken using Percona XtraBackup (PXB) so it does not lock the database during the backup.

With MySQL 5.7, a backup was taken using PXB 2.4. Due to the new data dictionaries, redo log and undo log in MySQL 8.0, we also upgraded PXB to 8.0.27 to avoid …

Importing CSV files into a MySQL HeatWave Database Service instance is very easy and efficient thanks to MySQL Shell. It can be used to import data from RedShift as we describe in this post.