MySQL Server generates several logs that can help you monitor the activities of the server. However, once these logs are enabled, they can grow in size and start taking up too much disk space. This is why it’s important to have an automated way of archiving and preserving MySQL log files for a certain duration, as well as deleting the old ones. In this blog post, we describe some best practices for setting up and managing MySQL error logs, general logs and slow query logs for your MySQL deployments.

Setting Up MySQL Server Logging

Let’s look at how to setup the following 3 types of logs:

Error Log

Logs all the problems encountered during starting, running, or stopping mysqld. This log can be enabled by having the following option in /etc/my.cnf file:

…

A very useful helper in your join toolbox can be a delete join. Even though it’s not a special join type but a join used within DELETE statements, it’s still worth mentioning. However, from time to time when I want to make use of delete joins  on my own, I somehow managed it to forgot the syntax and have to look it up somewhere. Therefor, here is a description as well as an example.

Take care: A delete join is a very powerful weapon. And with great power comes great responsibility! I recommend to develop the delete join on a development database. At least, make sure you have a working an recent backup before trying to delete things. A delete statement that uses joins makes it easy to shot yourself in the foot. And if you do, it probably blows away your hole leg.

DELETE join syntax

When you …

Recently, someone emailed me:I have a requirement in MYSQL as follows:
we have a table EMP and we have to restrict the users not delete employees with DEPT_ID = 10. If user executes a DELETE statement without giving any WHERE condition all the rows should be deleted except those with DEPT_ID = 10.

We are trying to write a BEFORE DELETE trigger but we are not able to get this functionality.

I have seen your blog where you explained about Using an UDF to Raise Errors from inside MySQL Procedures and/or Triggers. Will it helps me to get this functionality? Could you suggest if we have any other alternatives to do this as well?Frankly, I usually refer people that write me these things to a public forum, but this time I felt like …

In my last post, I discussed how fractal tree data structures can be up to two orders of magnitude faster on deletions over B-trees. I focused on the deletions where the row entry is known (the storage engine API handler::delete_row), but I did not fully analyze how MySQL delete statements can be fast. In this post, I do. Here I show how one can use TokuDB, a storage engine that uses fractal tree data structures, to make MySQL deletions run fast.

Let’s take a step back and analyze the work needed to be done to execute a MySQL delete statement. Suppose we have the table:

create table foo (
        id auto_increment
        a int,
        b int,
        primary key (id)
)

Say we wish to perform the following operation that deletes 100,000 rows:

delete from foo where a=1;

In MySQL, …

The Daily WTF collects excellent tales from the real world. These days, the dismal dramatic sagas are often (at least in part) about mistakes involving databases; no surprise there, they’re so prolific…

Anyway, if you can learn from other people’s mistakes, that’s cheap and efficient education! I thought I’d share today’s edition with you: it’s called Death by Delete. Read and enjoy^H^H^H^H^Hlearn.

Introduction

A question I recently saw on Stack Overflow titled Faster way to delete matching [database] rows? prompted me to organize my thoughts and observations on the subject and quickly jot them down here.

Here is the brief description of the task: say, you have 2 MySQL tables a and b. The tables contain the same type of data, for example log entries. Now you want to delete all or a subset of the entries in table a that exist in table b.

Solutions Suggested By Others

DELETE FROM a WHERE EXISTS (SELECT b.id FROM b WHERE b.id = a.id);

DELETE a FROM a INNER JOIN b on a.id=b.id;

DELETE FROM a WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM b)

The Problem With Suggested Solutions

Solutions above are all fine if the tables are quite small and the …

I've come up with some interesting workarounds for missing features using @session variables and I'd like to share one with you today: DELETE ... JOIN ... LIMIT N;

okay, so we've got two tables, one with many duplicates and one with no duplicates.
We want to join the tables using 'id', but only want to delete N duplicates from t1.
MySQL's DELETE does not include LIMIT support when JOIN is used, so we need to work around
that using some fancy footwork:


mysql> select * from t1;
+------+------+
| id | abc |
+------+------+
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 |
+------+------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from t2;
+----+------+
| id | xyz |
+----+------+
| 1 | 1 |
+----+------+
1 row …