Schema changes are required to add new features or to fix bugs in an application. However, there is no standard procedure to make the changes in a quick and safe manner. If the changes are not made considering the necessary precautions, you may face unwanted outages on the database that can cause serious problems to your business. In this blog post, I will delve into the most important things to consider while preparing a schema change.

Table size and concurrency

When assessing a schema change, one of the most important things to consider is the table size and concurrency. For small tables, the ALTER operation usually takes a few milliseconds up to a few seconds. Here is where concurrency plays another important role: if the table has periods of low concurrency during the day and the application allows having it locked for a few seconds or minutes, …

The auto-increment feature, which generates unique values for primary key columns, is an integral part of the database’s design. With the release of MySQL 8, a notable enhancement was introduced to the auto-increment counter. Compared to MySQL 5.7, this enhancement ensures that the maximum auto-increment counter value persists between server restarts, providing enhanced consistency and reliability in data management. In this article, we will look into this enhancement, compare MySQL 5.7 with MySQL 8, and provide practical examples to demonstrate the differences.

Auto-increment in MySQL 5.7

In MySQL 5.7, the auto-increment counter works as follows: when a new row is inserted into a table with an auto-increment column, the counter increments by 1, and the generated value is used for the primary key of the inserted row. This counter value is stored in memory and is not persistent across server restarts. As a result, if the server …

With the short work week due to the US Labor Day holiday on last Monday, I barely got this week’s OpenLampTech newsletter out. But, here it is in all its glory. Thanks for reading.

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The Newsletter for PHP and MySQL Developers

Receive a copy of my ebook, “10 MySQL Tips For Everyone”, absolutely free when you subscribe to the OpenLampTech newsletter.

In OpenLampTech issue #95, there is great content on:

• An OpenLampTech text-based developer interview
• WebAssembly and PHP
• Laravel Transactions …

Oracle CloudWorld 2023 is coming very soon and as usual there are plenty of MySQl related talks. My talk is MySQL High Availability and Disaster Recovery. What specifically will I be talking about? MySQL High Availability & Disaster Recovery @ CloudWorld 2023 MySQL InnoDB Cluster and MySQl InnoDB ClusterSet provide a complete solution for high availability and disaster […]

Percona University Online has released a new free course, “MySQL 5.7 End of Life Options – Free Course at Percona University Online,” by Dave Stokes, Technical Evangelist at Percona. 

Dave is the author of MySQL & JSON – A Practical Programming Guide. He started to work with MySQL from the 3.29 version and was a part of the MySQL Community Team for over a decade.

MySQL 5.7 reaches its End of Life in October 2023. The Era of MySQL 5.x will be over, and only MySQL 8.0 will be officially supported. Learn how to keep your database secure and performant after that date and what real options you have if you decide to upgrade or stay on the current version. 

This course consists of eight short videos. Pass a brief quiz on Google Classroom afterward to receive a Certificate of Completion from Percona. The …

In the recent past, I shared in a Reddit post that I was searching for developers who were interested in participating in a text-based interview for the OpenLampTech publication.

I am super-excited that Will Earp agreed to participate in this developer interview for the OpenLampTech readers.

Read more >>>: Developer Interview with Will Earp – Substack Repost

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The Newsletter for PHP and MySQL Developers

Receive a copy of my ebook, “10 MySQL Tips For …

Are you planning an upgrade for your Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC)? Upgrading to PXC 8.0 can be a smooth process, but sometimes challenges arise that require careful troubleshooting. In this…

The post How to fix Percona XtraDB Cluster 8.0 Upgrade issues first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

The content keeps dropping and I keep publishing OpenLampTech each and every week. We are nearing the 100-issue milestone. Thanks to you, the OpenLampTech publication is already a success.

Continue reading >>>: OpenLampTech issue #94 – Substack Repost

Custom WooCommerce and Shopify Solutions

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The Newsletter for PHP and MySQL Developers

Receive a copy of my ebook, “10 MySQL Tips For Everyone”, absolutely free when you subscribe to the OpenLampTech newsletter.

…

This blog was originally published in February 2019 and was updated in September 2023.

Web applications rely on databases to run the internet, powering everything from e-commerce platforms to social media networks to streaming services. MySQL is one of the most popular database management systems, playing a pivotal role in the functionality and performance of web applications.

In today’s blog, I’ll take a look at MySQL collation and charset settings to shed light on how they impact the performance of web applications and how to use them to effectively communicate with your users.

Understanding Character Sets and Encoding in MySQL

Character sets and encoding in MySQL play a vital role in how data is stored and retrieved in a database. A character set is a collection of characters with unique representations for each character, such as letters, numbers, and symbols, that define how data is …

This blog was originally published in November 2021 and was updated in September 2023.

MySQL server performance can sometimes be perplexing, and if you’ve ever wondered about the role of triggers in influencing your MySQL server’s memory allocation, this post is for you. MySQL triggers are a powerful tool for database administrators and developers, enabling them to automate tasks, enforce data consistency, and respond to events within the database seamlessly.

Here, we first cover the basics of MySQL Triggers, and then we take a deeper dive, exploring their impact on memory usage and providing strategies to optimize MySQL server performance.

What is a Trigger in MySQL?

A Trigger in MySQL is a database object that plays a pivotal role in database management. It is essentially a set of instructions or a program that is executed automatically in response to specific events or actions occurring within the …