We have had a look at how MySQL 8 handles JSON recently, but with all those JSON functions and expressions it is clear that many JSON accesses cannot be fast. To grab data from a JSON column, you will use a lot of $->>field expressions and similar, and without indexes nothing of this will be fast.

JSON cannot be indexed.

But MySQL 8 offers another feature that comes in handy: Generated columns and indexes on those. Let’s look at the parts, step by step, and how to make them work, because they are useful even outside of the context of JSON.

An example table

For the following example we are going to define a table t1 with an integer id and two integer data fields, a and b. We will be filling it with random integers up to 999 for the data values:

MySQL 8 provides solid support for the JSON data type. The manual has an overview of the data type, a JSON function reference, an an overview on generated column indexes, and explains multi-values indexes.

Creating JSON columns

Creating JSON columns is easy: Make the column of the JSON data type, fill in valid JSON data.

mysql> create table t ( id integer not null primary key auto_increment, j json);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)

mysql> insert into t (j) values 
-> ('null'),
-> ('true'),
-> …

Over the last few months, I have written numerous blog posts on different features of the MySQL Shell ranging from basic CRUD to aggregate functions and DDL. As a part of the MySQL version 8 release, MySQL Shell is a powerful and alternative environment that you can manage and work with your data in using a choice of 3 languages: Python, Javascript, or SQL. So this blog post is a simple compilation of all the Python mode related posts, in one easy-to-access location…

Photo by Tamara Gore on Unsplash

Self-Promotion:

If you enjoy the content written here, by all means, share this blog and your favorite post(s) with others who may benefit …

    One of the problems with Structured Query Language as opposed to languages like C++, Java, Python, or PHP is that it is hard to tell if a query is good or bad just by looking at it.  A programmer with a few months of coding experience can be shown a snippet of code from a project and have a pretty good chance of telling if that code is good or not.  Some call this a 'code smell'.

    A programmer can tell if the code is legible, understandable, and many times if it performs well often times at just a glance.  Want to do an experiment on this?  Go out to Github and check out a handful of random projects.  Good code often just looks good.

    But SQL is different.  It is mostly a declarative language, telling the computer what it wants rather than how to make what it wants. You can random pull SQL queries off Gitthub or Stackoverflow or Reddit …

InnoDB ReplicaSet was introduced from MySQL 8.0.19. It works based on the MySQL asynchronous replication. Generally, InnoDB ReplicaSet does not provide high availability on its own like InnoDB Cluster, because with InnoDB ReplicaSet we need to perform the manual failover. AdminAPI includes the support for the InnoDB ReplicaSet. We can operate the InnoDB ReplicaSet using the MySQL shell. 

• InnoDB cluster is the combination of MySQL shell and Group replication and MySQL router
• InnoDB ReplicaSet is the combination of MySQL shell and MySQL traditional async replication and MySQL router

Why InnoDB ReplicaSet?

• You can manually perform the switchover and failover with InnoDB ReplicaSet
• You can easily add the new node to your replication environment. InnoDB ReplicaSet helps with data provisioning (using MySQL clone plugin) and setting up the replication.

In this …

     VIEWs have been a handy feature of MySQL for many years but do you know about the WITH CHECK OPTION clause?  The WITH CHECK OPTION clause is used for a updatable views to prohibit the changes to those views that would produce rows which are not included in the defining query.

    VIEW Definition    Since a lot of SQL novices read my blog, I'd like to start with the definition of a view "Views are stored queries that when invoked produce a result set. A view acts as a virtual table" according the MySQL Manual.
SQL > CREATE VIEW x_city AS             SELECT     Name,                        …

Question: Hey, I got a UNIQUE INDEX, but I can store multiple rows with the same value, NULL. That is surprising. Is that a bug?

This is a rewrite of the same in German from 9 years ago.

root@localhost [kris]> create table t ( a integer, b integer, unique (a,b));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

root@localhost [kris]> insert into t values (1, 2);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

root@localhost [kris]> insert into t values (1, 2);
ERROR 1062 (23000): Duplicate entry '1-2' for key 't.a'

This does not work, as expected. But this does:

root@localhost [kris]> truncate table t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.16 sec)

root@localhost [kris]> insert into t values ( 1, NULL);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)

root@localhost [kris]> insert into t values ( 1, NULL);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.03 …

This is the updated and english version of some older posts of mine in German. It is likely still incomplete, and will need information added to match current MySQL, but hopefully it is already useful.

Old source articles in German: 1, 2 and 3.

Some vocabulary

Symbol, Font, Encoding and Collation - what do they even mean?

A character set is a collection of symbols that belong together. That is a completely abstract thing, and also almost useless. The only thing you can do with a character set is decide if a specific symbol is legal within a context or not. And, if it is legal, what position the …

 In a blog post I posted on the 16th of January I showed some graphs of CPU

usage, network usage and disk usage. The benchmark that was running was

a modified variant of YCSB (Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark) based on version

0.15.0 of YCSB.

In this blog post I will describe the setup of the NVMe drives for this

benchmark using DenseIO machines in the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Cloud has a variety of machines available. In this benchmark we wanted

to show NDB with a database size of around 20 TByte of user data in a replicated

setup.

There are numerous ways to connect disk drives to Oracle Cloud machines. One

manner is to use block storage. In this case the actual storage is on separate …

Disclaimer: the following script only works for Percona Server for MySQL 5.7, and relies on enabling performance schema (PS) instrumentation which can add overhead on high concurrent systems, and is not intended for continuous production usage as it’s a POC (proof of concept).

Introduction

In Percona Support, we frequently receive tickets related to deadlocks and even though the deadlock concept is simple, troubleshooting might not be in all cases. 

As explained in How to Deal with MySQL Deadlocks, a deadlock occurs when two or more transactions mutually hold and request for locks, creating a cycle of dependencies. MySQL will detect deadlocks and kill one of the transactions (making it rollback), and the deadlock will be printed in SEIS (show engine innodb status). Limitations of using this approach …