Foreign key related issues are very common when dealing with DDL changes in MySQL using Percona toolkit. In this blog post, I will explain how the tool (pt-online-schema-change) handles foreign key constraints when executing a DDL change.

First of all, I would like to explain why foreign keys have to be handled at all before writing more about the “How”. Foreign key constraints are aware of table rename operations. In other words, if the parent table is renamed, the child table automatically knows it and changes the foreign key constraint accordingly. Please have a look at the below example, and you can see the table name is automatically updated in the child table after the rename operation on the parent table:

mysql> show create table prd_details \G
*************************** 1. row *************************** …

Before we proceed, here is useful blog post  written by Peter on Hijacking Innodb Foreign Keys.

However, if you are trying to get rid of an unused Foreign Key (FK) constraint and related columns from versions older than mysql 5.6 or tables which cannot be executed with

ALTER TABLE ... ALGORITHM=INPLACE

  because of limitations mentioned here (specifically tables with 5.5 TIMESTAMP formats), you can use pt-online-schema-change  to drop such foreign keys.

For DROP FOREIGN KEY

constraint_name

  with  PT-OSC requires specifying

_constraint_name

  rather than the real

constraint_name

Thanks to all who attended my “MySQL Query Tuning” webinar on July 24.  If you missed it, you can you can download the slides and also watch the recorded video. Thank you for the excellent questions after the webinar as well. Query tuning is a big topic and, due to the limited time, I had to skip some material, especially some of the monitoring. I would like, however, to answer all the questions I did not get into during the webinar session.

Q: Did you reset the query cache before doing your benchmark on your query? 0.00 seconds sounds too good 

A: (This is in response to a …