I always get interesting feedback on some posts. On my test case for discovering the STR_TO_DATE function’s behavior, the comment was tragically valid. I failed to cleanup after my test case. That was correct, and I should have dropped param table and the two procedures.

While appending the drop statements is the easiest, I thought it was an opportunity to have a bit of fun and write another procedure that will cleanup test case tables within the test_month_name procedure. Here’s sample dynamic drop_table procedure that you can use in other MySQL stored procedures:

CREATE PROCEDURE drop_table
( table_name  VARCHAR(64))
BEGIN
 
  /* Declare a local variable for the SQL statement. */
  DECLARE stmt VARCHAR(1024);
 
  /* Set a session variable with two parameter markers. */
  SET @SQL := CONCAT('DROP TABLE ',table_name);
 
  /* Check if the …

As many know, I’ve adopted Learning SQL by Alan Beaulieu as a core reference for my database class. Chapter 7 in the book focuses on data generation, manipulation, and conversion.

The last exercise question in my check of whether they read the chapter and played with some of the discussed functions is:

1. Use one or more temporal function to write a query that convert the ’29-FEB-2024′ string value into a default MySQL date format. The result should display:

   +--------------------+
   | mysql_default_date |
   +--------------------+
   | 2024-02-29         |
   +--------------------+
   1 row in set, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
   

If you’re not familiar with the behavior of MySQL functions, this could look like a difficult problem to solve. If you’re risk inclined you would probably try the STR_TO_DATE function but if you’re not risk inclined the description of the %m specifier might suggest you …

Sometimes you hear from some new developers that MySQL only makes case insensitive string comparisons. One of my students showed me their test case that they felt proved it:

SELECT STRCMP('a','A') WHERE 'a' = 'A';

Naturally, it returns 0, which means:

• The values compared by the STRCMP() function makes a case insensitive comparison, and
• The WHERE clause also compares strings case insensitively.

As a teacher, you’re gratified that the student took the time to build their own use cases. However, in this case I had to explain that while he was right about the STRCMP() function and the case insensitive comparison the student used in the WHERE clause was a choice, it wasn’t the only option. The student was wrong to conclude that MySQL couldn’t make case sensitive string comparisons.

I modified his sample by adding the required BINARY keyword for a case sensitive comparison in …

Rollback is an operation, which changes the current state of the transaction to the previous state. Undo logs are generally required if we want to roll back any of the uncommitted transactions and it plays a major role in Isolation.

For any changes made during a transaction, it must be stored priorly, because they are required if we choose to roll back the transaction.

Entries are made in undo logs when data modifications are done. If a transaction modifies data with SQL commands, It will create discrete undo logs for each operation. Once a transaction is committed MySQL is free to purge the undo logs created in that transaction. 

To know more about undo logs, you can check our previous blogs on overview to undo logs.

Usually, the Rollback process will take more time than the original operation. Because …

In 2009, I showed an example of how to use the MySQL LOAD DATA INFILE command. Last year, I updated the details to reset the secure_file-priv privilege to use the LOAD DATA INFILE command, but you can avoid that approach with a simple Python 3 program like the one in this example. You also can use MySQL Shell’s new parallel table import feature, introduced in 8.0.17, as noted in a comment on this blog post.

The example requires creating an avenger table, avenger.csv file, a readWriteData.py Python script, run the readWriteData.py Python script, and a query that validates the insertion of the avenger.csv file’s data into the avenger table. The complete code in five steps using the sakila demonstration database:

• Creating the …

Working through our chapter on MySQL views, I wrote the query two ways to introduce the idea of SQL tuning. That’s one of the final topics before introducing JSON types.

I gave the students this query based on the Sakila sample database after explaining how to use the EXPLAIN syntax. The query only uses only inner joins, which are generally faster and more efficient than subqueries as a rule of thumb than correlated subqueries.

SELECT   ctry.country AS country_name
,        SUM(p.amount) AS tot_payments
FROM     city c INNER JOIN address a
ON       c.city_id = a.city_id INNER JOIN customer cus
ON       a.address_id = cus.address_id INNER JOIN payment p
ON       cus.customer_id = p.customer_id INNER JOIN country ctry
ON       c.country_id = ctry.country_id
GROUP BY ctry.country;

It generated the following tabular explain plan output:

 …

In reply to a question about how to conditionally drop an index on a table in MySQL. It appears the syntax doesn’t exist. However, maybe it does and I missed it. If I did miss it, I’m sure somebody will let me know. However, I simply have a dropIndexIfExists stored procedure for this type of database maintenance.

Below is my dropIndexIfExists stored procedure:

-- Conditionally drop the procedure.
DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS dropIndexIfExists;

-- Change the default semicolon delimiter to write a PSM
-- (Persistent Stored Module) or stored procedure.
DELIMITER $$

-- Create the procedure.
CREATE PROCEDURE dropIndexIfExists
( pv_table_name  VARCHAR(64)
, pv_index_name  VARCHAR(64))
BEGIN

  /* Declare a local variable for the SQL statement. */
  DECLARE stmt VARCHAR(1024);

  /* Set a session variable with two parameter markers. */
  SET @SQL := CONCAT('ALTER TABLE ',pv_table_name,'DROP INDEX ',pv_index_name);

  /* Check if the constraint exists. …

While exporting the table with MySQL native utility, we don’t have any control on the process, and also there will be no progress update as well on the process completion. So when exporting the larger table will consume high resource utilization and also the disk space usage will also be high.

MySQL shell utility will make the process easier. It will export the table and we can import the data back with a parallel thread and also will provide the current progress status on export/import progress.

util.exportTable() utility was introduced in Shell – 8.0.22 version, will export the data in a controlled manner. We can store the data in either local or Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage bucket as well.

We will see about the compression ratio along with the time taken for native MySQL vs Shell utility

Feature :

• Compression
• Progress status
• Supported output …

We all tried various alternative methods for modifying the table structure, but pt-online-schema-change (pt-osc) is the most convenient and preferred method for performing the alter online. It has more granular control too. But it may lead to data loss if proper precautionary steps are not taken care of.

In this blog, we are going to modify a column to a unique key using pt-osc, below I have shared the table structure.

mysql> show create table test\G
* 1. row *
Table: test
Create Table: CREATE TABLE test (
Personid int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
LastName varchar(255) NOT NULL,
FirstName varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
Age int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (Personid)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

I have inserted the data of 1000 rows using …

An interesting outcome of teaching SQL is discovering what skills new users require. One that I continuously rediscover is how to build a test case for various elements of SQL. This is a small article on querying with filters in the WHERE clause.

There are several of the exercises in Alan Beaulieu’s Learning SQL, 3rd Edition that would benefit from example setup. For example, Chapter 4 provides a snapshot of the payment table but doesn’t provide any instructions.

You can create an exercise_4_2 table with the following SQL statement if you plan to change the data:

CREATE TABLE exercise_4_2 AS
SELECT payment_id
,      customer_id
,      amount
,      payment_date
FROM   payment
WHERE  payment_id BETWEEN 101 AND 120;

Alternatively, you can create an exercise_4_2 view with the following SQL statement if you plan to only query the data:

CREATE VIEW exercise_4_2 AS
SELECT payment_id
, …