By now you must have read our documentation on isolation levels and also our Support for Transaction Isolation Levels. It is worth noting that the default transaction isolation level in MySQL 8 is REPEATABLE READ.

Here is a simple example of this, in action (you can test this on two different nodes, even across a 9-node Galera Cluster!).

First we do some simple setup:

CREATE DATABASE isolate;

USE isolate;

CREATE TABLE products (
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(50),
price DECIMAL(10, 2)
);

Then we insert some initial data:

INSERT INTO products (id, name, …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the “Introduction into storage engine troubleshooting” webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending the July 14 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: At which isolation level do 

pt-online-schema-change

 and 

pt-archive

  copy data from a table?

A: Both tools do not change the server’s default transaction isolation level. Use either

REPEATABLE READ

 or …

Introduction

XA stands for “eXtended Architecture”, and is a standard created by The Open Group for distributed transaction processing. While MySQL 5.0 was the first version to support XA, MySQL 5.7 has removed major limitations,  fixed a number of bugs, and increased overall test-case coverage.…

So I ran across a situation today dealing with having to update a field but the user was unable to do so because of the related foreign key constraints.

This blog post with be a simple example showing a foreign key and how to update them if you have to do so.

First let us create a simple table and populate it with random data.

CREATE TABLE `table_w_code` (
`SOMECode` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`NameofCode` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`SOMECode`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB ;


Now we will need another table that has a foreign key tied to our previous table.

[anothermysqldba]> CREATE TABLE `table_with_fk` (
`SOMEID` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`SOMECode` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`Somemorefields` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci …

This is part of the ongoing work on improving the transaction life cycle management. In 5.7.2 we split the transaction list into two. The read-only transaction list and the read-write transaction list. There was another "virtual" list, the auto-commit non-locking  read-only (AC-NL-RO) transaction list. The change in 5.7.2 was that by default a transaction was treated as read only and added to the read-only transaction list. Only when it was determined that the transaction was going to do an update we removed the transaction from the read-only list and moved it to the read-write transaction list. This initial add to the the read-only list forced the acquisition of the trx_sys_t::mutex. Acquiring the mutex during transaction start/begin has a cost. Promoting a transaction from read-only to read-write we had to acquire the trx_sys_t::mutex to add to the read-write transaction list and so that is not too expensive and unavoidable. There is another …

While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not been covered well, and since there are still a large number of MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 installations that would upgrade or are in the process of upgrading to MySQL 5.5, I thought it necessary to discuss what these implications exactly are.

To read what Metadata Locking exactly is please read this section here in the MySQL manual.

Let’s start off with having a look at the Meta Data Locking behavior prior to MySQL 5.5.3

Metadata Locking behavior prior to MySQL 5.5.3

Prior to MySQL 5.5.3 a statement that opened a …

Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) are one of the key replication enhancements in MySQL 5.6. GTIDs make it simple to track and compare replication across a master - slave topology. This enables:

- Much simpler recovery from failures of the master,

- Introduces great flexibility in the provisioning and on-going management of multi-tier or ring (circular) replication topologies.

A new on-demand MySQL 5.6 GTID webinar delivered by the replication engineering team is now available, providing deep insight into the design and implementation of GTIDs, and how they enable users to simplify MySQL scaling and HA. The webinar covers:

- Concepts: What is a GTID? How does the …

By default, when connected to MySQL server, every command is executed as a distinct transaction. As a result, after each INSERT SQL statement MYSQL saves data to the database and commits transaction. When your application inserts hundreds and thousands of records, your database is busy in saving new records all the time and you are loosing in speed.

The solution for this problem is very easy.

Justin Swanhart wrote a blog on Differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ transaction isolation levels and I thought I'd give my view on this issue.
To begin with, from a technical standpoint, Justin is correct in his statements, that is not why I am writing this (and this is the reason I'm writing a separate blogpost instead of just commenting his), but there is more to it than that.
What Justin really writes about is how these isolation levels are implemented in a particular database, in this case InnoDB. For example the sentence "There are a few differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ, and they are all related to locking." makes this very clear, these isolation levels, as defined by ANSI SQL as well as how they are implemented by other databases, …

In the latest episode of our “Meet The MySQL Experts” podcast, Luis Soares, Engineering Manager of MySQL Replication discusses the new Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) that are part of the latest MySQL 5.6 Development Release. We are also joined by Chuck Bell who discusses how the new MySQL HA utilities use GTIDs to create a self-healing replication topology.

In the podcast, we cover how GTIDs and the HA utilities are implemented, how they are configured and considerations for their use.

You can also learn more from Luis’ blog on GTIDs in MySQL 5.6 and Chuck’s …