While looking at partitioning I recently made a mistake which I guess can happen to others. Often this is due to not fully reading the documentation or scanning it too quickly and misunderstanding what’s being said.

So this post is to complain about the MySQL partitioning syntax and to warn others who may easily make the same mistake without realising.

First we probably need to ask why we are partitioning a table in the first place. The main reasons for this are I think:

• to improve query performance
• to reduce individual .ibd file sizes for large tables (if using innodb_file_per_table)

In my case I wanted to do both. I had a several tables which store a large number of rows (batches of data) based on an incremental batch number. One of these tables was around 40 GB and had about 500,000,000 rows in it.  When processing data in this table often all the data from a particular batch …

Indexes are a very important part of databases and are used frequently to speed up access to particular data item or items. So before working with indexes, it is important to understand how indexes work behind the scene and what is the data structure that is used to store these indexes, because unless you understand the inner working of an index, you will never be able to fully harness its power.

Here’s something that’s not really documented anywhere (unless you count ha_innodb.cc as a source of server documentation). You may have some idea about the MySQL/Drizzle row buffer format. This is passed around the storage engine interface: in for write_row and update_row and out for the various scan and index read methods.

If you want to see the docs for it that exist in the code, check out store_key_val_for_row in ha_innodb.cc.

However, there is another format that is passed to your engine (and that your engine is expected to understand) and for lack of a better name, I’m going to call it the key tuple format. The first place you’ll probably see this is when implementing the index_read function for a Cursor (or handler in MySQL speak).

You get two things: a pointer to the buffer and the length of the buffer. Since a key can be made up of multiple parts, some of which can be NULL and some of which can be of …

During my day-to-day activities, I use the Bash shell a lot. My #1 policy is to optimize the most frequently used activities as much as possible, so Iâ€ve compiled these handy bash shortcuts and hints (tested in SecureCRT on Windows and Konsole on Linux). The article only touches on the default bash mode – emacs, not vi. If you havenâ€t specifically assigned your shell mode to vi (set –o vi), youâ€re almost certainly using the emacs mode. Learn these and your shell productivity will skyrocket, I guarantee it.

Update #1: In response to a few people saying this list is too short and “[he] could've added something to it, to atleast make it look longer†(quote from one of Stumbleupon reviewers), I want to clarify something. I deliberately did not include …