Benchmarking is a popular topic. People love drawing graphs as much as watching how X is 10% faster than Y; there must be something special in measurements.

For a DBA, however, more tangible improvements come from less popular area of database maintenance. While MariaDB spreads FUD around InnoDB (nonetheless still uses it) I have to admit InnoDB gets more friendly to DBAs.

In MySQL 5.6 new temporary table naming scheme was introduced – one of improvements. Invisible, yet important.

Temporary table names became more random and should not ever be reused.

Some time ago I wrote a post about how to remove …

When ALTER TABLE crashes MySQL server it leaves orphaned records in InnoDB dictionary. It is annoying because next time you run the same ALTER TABLE query it will fail with error:

ERROR 1050 (42S01) at line 1: Table 'sakila/#sql-ib712' already exists

The post explains why it happens and how to fix it.

When you run ALTER table InnoDB follows the plan:

1. Block the original table
2. Create an empty temporary table with the new structure. The name of the new table is something like #sql-ib712.
3. Copy all records from the original table to the temporary one
4. Swap the temporary and original tables
5. Unblock the original table

The temporary table is a normal InnoDB table except it’s not visible to a user. InnoDB creates a record in the dictionary for the temporary table as for any other table.

If MySQL crashes in the middle of the …