In MySQL 8.0 there are two new features designed to support lock handling: NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED. In this post, we’ll look at how MySQL 8.0 handles hot rows. Up until now, how have you handled locks that are part of an active transaction or are hot rows? It’s likely that you have the application attempt to access the data, and if there is a lock on the requested rows, you incur a timeout and have to retry the transaction. These two new features help you to implement sophisticated lock handling scenarios allowing you to handle timeouts better and improve the application’s performance.

To demonstrate I’ll use this product table.

mysql> select @@version;
+-----------+
| @@version |
+-----------+
| 8.0.11    |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

CREATE TABLE `product` (
`p_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`p_name` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`p_cost` decimal(19,4) NOT NULL,
`p_availability` enum('YES','NO') …

In this blog post, I’ll provide an explanation why you should avoid using the CREATE TABLE AS SELECT statement.

The SQL statement “create table <table_name> as select …” is used to create a normal or temporary table and materialize the result of the select. Some applications use this construct to create a copy of the table. This is one statement that will do all the work, so you do not need to create a table structure or use another statement to copy the structure.

At the same time there are a number of problems with this statement:

1. You don’t create indexes for the new table
2. You are mixing transactional and non-transactional statements in one transaction. As with any DDL, it will commit current and unfinished transactions
3. CREATE TABLE … SELECT …