I’m going to narrate you a story that happened around a crashing MyQL, Corrupted InnoDB table and finally the recovery by table restore. We will see how our database administrator detected the issue and what he did to resolve it. A day in MySQL Database Consultant’s day was taking its shape while a friend called […]

If we have InnoDB pages there are two ways to learn how many records they contain:

• PAGE_N_RECS field in the page header
• Count records while walking over the list of records from infimum to supremum

In some previous revision of the recovery tool a short summary was added to a dump which is produced by the constraints_parser.

But if a page is lost and page_parser hasn’t found it, all records from this page are lost. In other words per-page recovery statistics gives us little idea about whether or not a recovered table is complete.

To cover this flaw a new tool index_check is introduced in …

MySQL 5.6 introduces a new feature – microseconds resolution in some temporal types. As of 5.6.4 TIME, TIMESTAMP and DATETIME can have a fractional part. To create a field with subseconds you can specify precision in brackets: TIME(3), DATETIME(6) etc.

Obviously, the new feature requires the format change. All three types may now have a tail with a fractional part. The tail may be one, two or three bytes long and can store up to six digits after the point.

The non-fractional part has changed too. Thus, DATETIME uses only five bytes comparing to eight in previous versions.

As of revision 79 the …

Recently I had a case when a customer deleted the InnoDB main table space – ibdata1 – and redo logs – ib_logfile*.

MySQL keeps InnoDB files open all the time. The following recovery technique is based on this fact and it allowed to salvage the database.

Actually, the files were deleted long time ago – 6 months or so. As long as file is open physically it still exits in the file system and reachable to processes which have opened it.

Thus, from user perspective nothing has changed after the deletion. By the way, this is a good reason to monitor existence of these files!
But after the restart InnoDB will detect that there is neither system table space nor log files, so it will create empty ones. The InnoDB dictionary will be empty and InnoDB won’t be able to use a bunch of existing ibd files. This situation will be a job for …

Being a data recovery specialist and having recovered countless GBs of corrupted, and/or stranded, InnoDB data in my days, I am very happy to hear about the new InnoDB Transportable Tablespaces coming in MySQL 5.6!

Back in the day, if you had a stranded .ibd file (the individual InnoDB data file with –innodb-file-per-table option), you basically had nothing (even though that file contained all of the data). This was because unless you had the original instance that that particular .ibd file (table) originated from, there was no way to load it, import, or dump from it. So it was not of much use, though all the data was *right* there.

Thus I created the method of Recovering an InnoDB table from only an .ibd file (I should note that this was before the …

I recently wrote an article on dealing with an assertion failure in log/log0recv.c, specifically !page || (ibool)!!page_is_comp(page) == dict_table_is_comp(index->table).

I mention it because this occurred after a system outage, and I just encountered another system outage (either HDD power outage or some other serious HDD event), with a completely different assertion failure and error message. Similar to the one above, it’s also kind of obscure, so I wanted to post this so people searching for it will find this.

For reference, the first outage assertion failure was this:

InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 139838283589376 in file
log/log0recv.c line 1094
InnoDB: Failing assertion: !page || (ibool)!!page_is_comp(page) ==
dict_table_is_comp(index->table)

Here is the new assertion failure:

111201 16:45:00 InnoDB: Assertion failure in …

Not a big deal, but I just added a “Table of Contents” page to my blog to make finding older articles much easier.

I noticed most of my posts are quite lengthy, and it can take a bit of searching/clicking to find an older entry. So unless you happen to recall the ‘month/year’ it was published, which I don’t even remember that, then hopefully this will help.

Really simple, and looks just like this:

• Microseconds and MariaDB
• Dealing with Assertion failure in log/log0recv.c – !page || (ibool)!!page_is_comp(page) == dict_table_is_comp(index->table)
• MySQL Windows Users – Use Grep to Search MySQL Source Code
• …

Sometime you may need to recover a table when all you have is the .ibd file. In this case, if you try to load it into a new instance, your likely to encounter some errors about the table id not matching. And there is not really a way around this.

However, I’ve found two work-arounds for this:

Note: You will need the .ibd file and the CREATE TABLE statement for each table you want to recover using these methods.

1. Simulate the internal InnoDB table counter. That is, create work tables (with innodb_file_per_table enabled) until you have the internal pointer of table id equal to (1 - id_of_ibd_table_you_need_to_restore). (See Method #1)
2. Manually hex edit the .ibd file, changing the table id. (See Method #2)

*Note: There are some internal structures with this meta information, so you’ll need to dump/import that data after you get it loaded, so you avoid unpleasantries that will inevitably …

I’m returned from my 1-week vacation today and want to say - I’ve never been so productive as I was there Blue ocean, hot sun and white sand really helped me to finish my work on the first release of one really awesome project.

Today I’m proud to announce our first public release of the Data Recovery Toolkit for InnoDB - set of tools for checking InnoDB tablespaces and recovering data from damaged tablespaces or from dropped/truncated InnoDB tables.

This release already has a pretty decent set of features:

• Supports both REDUNDANT (pre mysql 5.0) and COMPACT (mysql 5.0+) versions of tablespaces
• Works with single tablespaces and file-per-table tablespaces
• Able to recover data even when processed InnoDB page has been reassigned …