MySQL information_schema comes with useful information about the database instance, status, … etc. which is needed for daily DBA work.
There are some simple queries on the information_schema that I use on my daily basis in which I’m writing this post for my reference and maybe a good reference for someone else too …

Finding tables without Primary or Unique Keys:

PKs are so important, especially, for InnoDB tables as MySQL uses PKs as a clustered index and having no PKs might lead to severe performance problems.

Also having no PKs is one of the main causes of slave lagging problems mainly when using RBR (Row-Based Replication), e.g. if a delete statement on the master will delete 1 million rows on a table without PK, a full table scan will take place. This “might” not be a problem on the master but on the slave 1 million full table scan will take place – because changes to the individual rows are being …

Automation software like Puppet, Chef, and Ansible can quickly load software on virtual servers. But how do you get your MySQL database instances loaded on these new servers? And how do you do it securely? Lets start with a fairly common pairing.

Ansible and Vagrant work very well together and the documentation for getting both to work together is rather extensive. BTW the newest version VirtualBox is 5.0 was recently released with a large number of improvements. Follow the documentation at their respective sites to get VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Ansible installed.

The linchpin is the Vagrantfile which controls how Vagrant starts the server. Inside this file we pull in an Ansible playbook.

Have you ever wondered what could happen if your MySQL database goes down?

Although it’s evident such a crash will cause downtime – and surely some business impact in terms of revenue – can you do something to reduce this impact?

The simple answer is “yes” by doing regular backups (of course) but are you 100% sure that your current backup strategy will really come through when an outage occurs? And how much precious time will pass (and how much revenue will be lost) before you get your business back online?

I usually think of backups as the step after HA fails. Let’s say we’re in M<>M replication and something occurs that kills the db but the HA can’t save the day. Let’s pretend that the UPS fails and those servers are completely out. You can’t failover; you have to restore data. Backups are a key piece of “Business Continuity.” Also factor in the frequent need to restore data that’s been …

This Log buffer edition covers Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL blog posts about new features, tips, tricks and best practices.

Oracle:

• Traditionally, assigning specific processes to a certain set of CPUs has been done by using processor sets (and resource pools). This is quite useful, but it requires the hard partitioning of processors in the system. That means, we can’t restrict process A to run on CPUs 1,2,3 and process B to run on CPUs 3,4,5, because these partitions overlap.
• Parallel_Degree_Limit, Parallel_Max_Degree, Maximum DOP? Confused?
• JDeveloper 12c – …

Introduction

The names of databases and tables within MySQL are known as identifiers. In the simplest case these identifiers are just strings of certain ASCII characters (the basic Latin letters, the digits 0-9, the dollar sign and the underscore). However, if an identifier is placed in quotes, it can contain any character of the full Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (except U+0000). We say that a character is a special character if it is permitted in a quoted identifier but not in an unquoted identifier.

MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB) 3.12.1 introduces support for proper handling of table and database names with special characters. In MEB versions prior to 3.12.1 database and table names were represented as ASCII strings and the same string was used on the command line, internally within MEB and in filenames.  This caused MEB to fail some …

Introduction

This is the sixth and final post in the series on the Pillars of PowerShell, at least part one of the final post. The previous posts in the series are:

1. Interacting
2. Commanding
3. Debugging
4. Profiling
5. Windows OS

PowerShell + SQL Server is just cool! You will see folks talk about the ability to perform a task against multiple servers at a time, automate implementing a configuration or database change, or just obtaining a bit of consistency when doing certain processes. I tend to use it just because I can, and it is fun to see what I can do. There are a …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.6.25-73.1 on July 9, 2015. Download the latest version from the Percona web site or from the Percona Software Repositories.

Based on MySQL 5.6.25, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.6.25-73.1 is the current GA release in the Percona Server 5.6 series. Percona Server is open-source and free – and …

Another fall, another MySQL community conference. What's the point? Haven't we heard it all before? Same old RDBMS, same old problems, same old speakers, same old venue? What can we expect this year's European conference? Well for starters, the venue has been moved from London to Amsterdam so we have a new acronym; PLEU or PLAM or PLNL? You can decide and use it in your #tweets.

If you hid from all the announcements, Percona acquired Tokutek in April 2015. Tokutek are a company invested in both MySQL and MongoDB landscapes through their fractal tree based storage engines. What does this mean? Well this gave birth to a new scope to the traditionally MySQL-focussed event. Amongst the plethora of high profile company representations you'll see MongoDB, Elastic and Couchbase. So if you're seeking a heterogeneous data conference then you should be there. …

I recently helped a customer figure out why a minor version MySQL upgrade was indicating that some tables needed to be rebuilt. The mysql_upgrade program should be run for every upgrade, no matter how big or small the version difference is, but when only the minor version changes, I would normally not expect it to require tables to be rebuilt.

Turns out some of their tables were still marked with an older MySQL version, which could mean a few things… most likely that something went wrong with a previous upgrade, or that the tables were copied from a server with an older version.

In cases like this, did you know there is a fast, safe and simple way to check the version associated with a table? You can do this by reading the FRM file, following the format specification found here.

If you look at that page, you’ll see that the …

Sometimes I give parts of a solution to increase the play time to solve a problem. I didn’t anticipate a problem when showing how to perform a sort operation with a CASE statement. It’s a sweet solution when you need to sort something differently than a traditional ascending or descending sort.

I gave my students this ORDER BY clause as an example:

  CASE
    WHEN filter = 'Debit' THEN 1
    WHEN filter = 'Credit' THEN 2
    WHEN filter = 'Total' THEN 3
  END;

It raises the following error in MySQL for students:

      ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'ORDER BY
  CASE
    WHEN filter = 'Debit' THEN 1
    WHEN filter = 'Credit' THEN' at line 6

It raises the …