MySQL Support Blogs

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A common problem when you need to set up a new database instance is to import the initial data. This can particularly be an issue, if you are converting an existing database so there is a large amount of data to import. In MySQL NDB Cluster 7.6 which just was announced as general available (GA) this week, there is a new tool to help with such imports: ndb_import.

The ndb_import utility takes a CSV file and imports the data into a table. (While C stands for comma, the tool is not limited to comma-separated files, in fact tabs is the default …

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Today – 31 March – is world backup day, so I thought I would write a little about backups in MySQL NDB Cluster.

Just because NDB Cluster offers built-in redundancy and high availability does not mean backups are not important. They are – as ever and as for everything in software. The redundancy does not protect against user errors (anyone ever executed DROP TABLE or DROP SCHEMA by accident?) neither does it protect against a natural disaster, fire, or another disaster hitting the data center. Similar with high availability.

In short, if the data is in any way remotely important for you, you ensure you have a backup. Furthermore, a backup is not worth any more than your ability to restore it. If a fire rages …

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I have had the opportunity to write a blog for Apress with a brief introduction to MySQL NDB Cluster. The blog gives a brief overview of the history and why you should consider it. The architecture is described before some key characteristics are discussed.

If you are interested, the blog can be found at https://www.apress.com/us/blog/all-blog-posts/what-is-mysql-ndb-cluster/15454530.

Happy reading.

…

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Sometimes it can be useful to take a step back and look at the world from a bit larger distance than usual. So in this blog, I will take a look at the high level architecture of MySQL Server.

Info …

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It is with great pleasure, I can announce that a new book dedicated to MySQL NDB Cluster has just been released. The book Pro MySQL NDB Cluster is written by my colleague Mikiya Okuno and myself and is a nearly 700 pages deep dive into the world of MySQL NDB Cluster. The book is published by Apress.

Tip: There are several ways to cluster MySQL. This book is about the product MySQL Cluster (often called MySQL NDB Cluster to clarify which cluster it is). There is also MySQL InnoDB Cluster, clustering using replication, and …

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There's a GTID_SUBTRACT function, and the manual shows how to write your own cheap GTID_UNION, but not a GTID_INTERSECT. Fortunately it's easy to write your own, as it's just subtracting twice.

CREATE FUNCTION GTID_INTERSECT(g1 TEXT, g2 TEXT)
RETURNS TEXT DETERMINISTIC
RETURN GTID_SUBTRACT(g1, GTID_SUBTRACT(g1, g2));

What use is it?

SET @slave_executed = '33738f8c-c1a5-11e7-8fc3-0a002700000f:1-681577,
421d139e-04b9-11e7-b702-0050569935dc:1-13764443,
52b9a949-d79d-11e3-80dd-0050568d193e:1-1207378:1207380-1261803:1261805-1267098:1267100-1267416:1267418-1589733';

SET @master_executed = '33738f8c-c1a5-11e7-8fc3-0a002700000f:1-730294,
421d139e-04b9-11e7-b702-0050569935dc:1-13764443,
52b9a949-d79d-11e3-80dd-0050568d193e:1-1207378:1207380-1261803:1261805-1589733';

SET @master_purged = '33738f8c-c1a5-11e7-8fc3-0a002700000f:1-681582,
421d139e-04b9-11e7-b702-0050569935dc:1-13077260,
…

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1. Watch the parentheses. It's:

ST_GeomFromText('POLYGON((outerRing), (innerRing), (innerRing), ...)')

The inner rings are optional. If you have just the outer ring, then it's still:

ST_GeomFromText('POLYGON((outerRing))')

and not:

ST_GeomFromText('POLYGON(outerRing)')

2. Polygons have to start and end at the same point.

3. Watch the commas. Rings are comma-delimited sets of of whitespace-delimited coordinate pairs:

x1 y1, x2 y2, x3 y3, x4 y4

not:
x1 y1 x2 y2 x3 y3
x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3, x4, y4
(x1, y1), (x2, y2), (x3, y3)
or other variations on that theme.

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How can you tell if a given workload on the master could be replicated with many parallel workers on the slave?

The slave_parallel_type=LOGICAL_CLOCK is an implementation of a Lamport clock. The implementation is described in WL #7165 - including a neat little ASCII-art graphic.

Each event in the binary log is stamped with two values:
- The sequence_number increments for each commit
- The last_committed is the sequence_number which was in effect when this transaction entered the prepare phase.

A slave worker cannot begin doing a transaction until the last_committed value is smaller than the sequence_number of all other running threads.

mysqlbinlog mysql-bin.0000x | grep last_committed

#160118 15:31:34 server id 3  end_log_pos 1527 CRC32 0xcdf6bd8d         GTID    last_committed=0        sequence_number=1 …

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This post was originally published on the MySQL Support Team Blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlsupport/entry/innodb_locks_analysis_why_is on 14 April 2017.

Consider the scenario that you execute a query. You expect it to be fast – typically subsecond – but now it take not return until after 50 seconds (innodb_lock_wait_timeout seconds) and then it returns with an error:

mysql> UPDATE world.City SET Population = Population + 999 WHERE ID = 130;
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

You continue to investigate the issue using the sys.innodb_lock_waits view or the underlying …

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This post was originally published on the MySQL Support Team Blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlsupport/entry/working_around_mysql_cluster_push on 5 August 2016.

I worked on an issue recently where a query was too slow when executed in MySQL Cluster. The issue was that Cluster has some restrictions when it comes to push down conditions.

As an example of this, consider the following query using the employees sample database. The query takes a look at the average salary based on how many years the employee has been with the company. As the latest hire date in the database is in January 2000, the query uses 1 February 2000 as the reference date.

Initially the query performs like (performance is …

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Consider the scenario that you execute a query. You expect it to be fast - typically subsecond - but now it take not return until after 50 seconds (innodb_lock_wait_timeout seconds) and then it returns with an error:

mysql> UPDATE world.City SET Population = Population + 999 WHERE ID = 130;
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

You continue to investigate the issue using the sys.innodb_lock_waits view or the underlying Information Schema tables (INNODB_TRX, INNODB_LOCKS and …

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https://dev.mysql.com/doc/en/load-data.html

BIT values cannot be loaded using binary notation (for example, b'011010').

$ cat test.txt

b'101010'
0b111000

-----

CREATE TABLE loadTest (b BIT(6));

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'test.txt' INTO TABLE loadTest;

/*--------+------+---------------------------------------+
| Level   | Code | Message                               |
+---------+------+---------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1406 | Data too long for column 'b' at row 1 |
| Warning | 1406 | Data too long for column 'b' at row 2 |
+---------+------+--------------------------------------*/

-- Note the wrong values:

SELECT BIN(b) FROM loadTest;
/*-------+
| BIN(b) |
+--------+
| 111111 |
| 111111 |
+-------*/

TRUNCATE loadTest;

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'test.txt' INTO TABLE loadTest (@b) 
  SET b = CAST(CONV(TRIM('''' FROM SUBSTRING_INDEX(@b, …

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Somebody asked on Freenode. I don't know why they wanted it. How would you drop all MySQL users who do not have "GRANT ALL ON *.* ... WITH GRANT OPTION"? That is, drop any users who have 'N' in any of the privilege columns in `mysql`.`user`.

My solution shown below. Did you think of a different approach?

My solution ▼

I used SQL to build SQL which built more SQL. Get the list of 'priv' columns from information_schema.columns. Build a query that looks for 'N' in any of those columns (it feels funny to search for a constant in a list of fields instead of a field in a list of constants, but it's perfectly legal). Use the results to build the DROP USER statement.

mysql -BNe "SELECT CONCAT('SELECT CONCAT(''DROP USER '', QUOTE(user), ''@'', QUOTE(Host), '';'') FROM mysql.user WHERE ''N'' IN (', GROUP_CONCAT(column_name), ')') FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_schema = 'mysql' AND table_name = 'user' AND …

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MySQL Support was represented at Oracle OpenWorld 2016 with two engineers: Ligaya Turmelle and Jesper Krogh. We did a total of four talks and spend 20 some hours in total at the Support Stars Bar. We would like to thank all of you who attended. It was good meeting some of you and talk about your experiences - both good and not so good - using MySQL.

If you attended one of our talks and would like to study some of the slides in more details - or you were not able to attend, all of our presentations are available from the Oracle OpenWorld content catalogue (except the Support Stars Bar mini briefing which is available from this blog):

• MySQL DBA Primer [TUT1718]
• …

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A customer showed that a particular client reported a less-than-helpful error message when it tried to display some meta-data about a table.

I couldn't repeat the behavior with just a copy of the schema, so I suspected it was because of the size of data in the customer's server - somebody had used an int where they needed a long.

The customer's data was quite large - many hundreds of GB - more than I could …

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There is not yet an equivalent to GROUP_CONCAT that produces a JSON array. (There is in MySQL 8, but that's not GA yet.) Until then, you can hack it together with string functions:

SELECT * FROM t;
+------+--------+
| id   | data   |
+------+--------+
|    1 | First  |
|    2 | Second |
+------+--------+

SELECT CONCAT('[', GROUP_CONCAT(JSON_OBJECT('id', id, 'value', data) SEPARATOR ', '), ']') AS j FROM t;
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| j                                                           |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| [{"id": 1, "value": "First"}, {"id": 2, "value": "Second"}] |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Or you can use all JSON functions but hack the grouping:

SELECT j FROM (
       SELECT
         @c := @c + 1 AS c, …

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It is soon time for the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. This year it takes place from 18 to 22 September. There will be a wide range of talks about MySQL and other Oracle products with speakers including Oracle developers, product management, Support, customers, and community members. So there should be something for everyone.

MySQL Support will have two talks this year:

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I worked on an issue last recently where a query was too slow when executed in MySQL Cluster. The issue was that Cluster has some restrictions when it comes to push down conditions.

As an example of this, consider the following query using the employees sample database. The query takes a look at the average salary based on how many years the employee has been with the company. As the latest hire date in the database is in January 2000, the query uses 1 February 2000 as the reference date.

Initially the query performs like (performance is with two data nodes and all nodes in the same virtual machine on a laptop, so the timings are not necessarily representative of a production system, though the improvements should be repeatable):

mysql> SELECT FLOOR(DATEDIFF('2000-02-01', hire_date)/365) AS LengthOfService,
              COUNT(DISTINCT employees.emp_no) AS NoEmployees, AVG(salary) AS AvgSalary
         FROM salaries
              STRAIGHT_JOIN …

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Workbench announced support for a spatial view in 6.2, but examples are somewhat lacking. Just how do you get a SHP into MySQL?

Download and unpack a SHP file such as these country boundaries.

In the Workbench installation directory, you'll find a program "ogr2ogr" that can convert .shp to .csv. Run it like this:

"C:\Program …

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MySQL 5.7 came out with support for JSON, improved geometry, and virtual columns. Here's an example showing them all playing together.

Download citylots.json.

It comes as one big object, so we'll break it up into separate lines:
grep "^{ .type" citylots.json > properties.json

Connect to a 5.7 instance of MySQL.

CREATE TABLE citylots (id …

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