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; …

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 …

In Managed Services, we have many customers, and as each has a different kind of config and environment, working on their environment is always fun and interesting. In this blog post, I will showcase an issue we faced when dropping a table and how it was resolved.

There was a ticket to drop a table in a client’s production environment (MySQL 5.7). The table had a # symbol at the beginning of the table’s name. I thought it was easy that we can use quotes or backtick symbols to specify the table to drop. But it did not work as I expected and I came to know why the customer created the ticket to drop the table.

The following example recreates the problem. It shows the table, but you are unable to see the structure and cannot drop it.

mysql> show tables;
+--------------------------+
| Tables_in_percona        |
+--------------------------+
| …

In managed services, we get requests to migrate from traditional to GTID-based replication. However, the customer does not want to first enable the GTID on the source node (production). Before MySQL 8.0.23, replication from the disabled GTID source to an enabled GTID replica was impossible.

In this blog, I will talk about a new MySQL feature introduced in 8.0.23, which allows MySQL to replicate from a GTID-disabled source to GTID-enabled replica. You can enable GTID assignment on a replication channel using the ASSIGN_GTIDS_TO_ANONYMOUS_TRANSACTIONS.

You can read the Percona doc if you are unaware of how GTID replication works:

https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.6/flexibility/online_gtid_deployment.html

…

Recently I came across an interesting investigation about long-running transactions getting killed on an Aurora Reader instance. In this article, I will explain why it is advisable to avoid long-running transactions on Aurora readers when executing frequent DDL operations on the Writer, or at least be aware of how a DDL can impact your Aurora readers.

Aurora uses a shared volume often called a cluster volume that manages the data for all the DB instances which are part of the cluster. Here DB instances could be a single Aurora instance or multiple instances (Writer and Aurora Read Replicas) within a cluster.

Aurora replicas connect to the same storage volume as the primary DB instance and support only read operations. So if you add a new Aurora replica it would not make a new copy of the table data and instead will connect to the shared cluster volume which contains all the data.

This could lead to an issue on replica …

There are eight configuration options related to the character_set in MySQL, as shown below. Without reading the MySQL Character Set documentation carefully, it could be hard to know what these configuration options are used for. In addition, for some of the options, unless there is further testing, it could be hard to know how MySQL uses them.

mysql> show variables like 'character_set%'; 
+--------------------------+-------------------------------------+ 
| Variable_name            | Value                               | 
+--------------------------+-------------------------------------+ 
| character_set_client     | utf8mb4                             | 
| character_set_connection | utf8mb4                             | 
| character_set_database   | utf8mb4 …

I wrote this post on MyRocks because I believe it is the most interesting new MySQL storage engine to have appeared over the last few years. Although MyRocks is very efficient for writes, I chose a more generic workload that will provide a different MyRocks use case.

The use case is the TPC-C benchmark but executed not on a high-end server but on a lower-spec virtual machine that is I/O limited like for example, with AWS EBS volumes. I decided to use a virtual machine with two CPU cores, four GB of memory, and storage limited to a maximum of 1000 IOPs of 16KB. The storage device has performance characteristics pretty similar to an AWS gp2 EBS volume of about 330 GB in size. I emulated these limits using the KVM iotune settings in my lab.

<iotune>
     <total_iops_sec>1000</total_iops_sec>
     <total_bytes_sec>16384000</total_bytes_sec> …

Table modifications are a common task for database administrators. In this blog, I’ll explain how to alter tables online in a controlled manner that does not disrupt application users or cause application downtime.

One of the tools in Percona Toolkit is pt-online-schema-change, a utility that alters the structure of a table without interfering with the reads or writes. The tool creates an empty copy of the table to alter and modify as desired before copying the rows from the original table into the new one.

When the copying is finished, it removes the original table and replaces it with the new one. Any changes made to data in the original tables during the copy process will be reflected in the new table as the tool creates triggers on …

In this blog, I’m going to discuss how to easily skip the replication errors in GTID (Global Transaction Identifier)-based replication.

In the MySQL world, if replication is broken we all use the famous SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=1; to skip the replication error. It always works if it’s a traditional binlogs events-based replication and is helpful to quickly resume the replication. But does this same method work for GTID-based replication? Let’s see.

In GTID-based replication, skipping a replication error in a broken replica is not as simple as binlogs-based replication. We have one old blog post — Repair MySQL 5.6 GTID replication by injecting empty transactions —where one of our colleagues showed us one way to skip and fix the replication.

Let’s get into action and …