For all those instant GUI people out there, there is an easy way to watch the present status of your MySQL Slaves using the watch command.

$ watch -n 1 -d "mysql -uroot -pxxxx mysql -e 'SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G'"

The watch provides a view of a file or command, and shows interval updates to this output (-n  seconds> option). You can also specific a granularity better then one second for example 0.5. -d also highlights the differences for you. So while you see the following output with your SHOW SLAVE STATUS, on a loaded system you will also see bin-log and relay-log changes, and perhaps Seconds_Behind_Master.

The question is, Why is Seconds_Behind_Master the last column in this display?


*************************** 1. row ***************************
Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
Master_Host: localhost
Master_User: repl
Master_Port: 10002
Connect_Retry: 60
Master_Log_File: master-bin.000006
Read_Master_Log_Pos: 102
Relay_Log_File: newyork-relay-bin.000055
Relay_Log_Pos: 244
Relay_Master_Log_File: master-bin.000006
Slave_IO_Running: Yes
Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
Replicate_Do_DB:
Replicate_Ignore_DB:
Replicate_Do_Table:
Replicate_Ignore_Table:
Replicate_Wild_Do_Table:
Replicate_Wild_Ignore_Table:
Last_Errno: 0
Last_Error:
Skip_Counter: 0
Exec_Master_Log_Pos: 102
Relay_Log_Space: 539
Until_Condition: None
Until_Log_File:
Until_Log_Pos: 0
Master_SSL_Allowed: No
Master_SSL_CA_File:
Master_SSL_CA_Path:
Master_SSL_Cert:
Master_SSL_Cipher:
Master_SSL_Key:
Seconds_Behind_Master: 0

With my very heavy travel load and skilling load I’ve not had time to scratch myself. It hasn’t stopped the brain working overtime on various issues including the classic find a pattern in a string starting with a wildcard character. On a recent gig I saw the true classic.


SELECT columns
FROM users
WHERE username LIKE '%str%'
OR firstname LIKE '%str%'
OR lastname LIKE '%str%'

I went through the various options and comments on leading ‘%’, OR’s, combined columns, FULLTEXT (which doesn’t work in this case), merge indexing etc, however it perplexed me that nobody has really solved this problem, or at least shared their solutions.

I have an idea, a theory and while I’d love to prove/disprove it, I simply just don’t have the time. So here are my notes, hopefully somebody can comment positively/negatively, do some research, or encourage me to pursue it more.

The Problem

The problem is quite simply the leading wildcard, Der!. So how do you eliminate the wildcard from the search?

My Idea

Working with the earlier example, and having a concatenated field of the three components (username,firstname,lastname), my idea is to encode into 27 bits, a bit for each alphabetic character (A-Z) found, and any non-alphabetic character except whitespace in bit 27.

This column is then indexed and searched for bitwise matches. Here is a pictorial description.

My idea is very simple, the question is, will it actually work.

The Questions

The goal is quite obviously to get an Index utilization, to a maximum say of 10%-25% of matching rows. Factors that would affect this include:

• If search string is one character, like a vowel I could this not useful, so an implied criteria for optimal work is at least 2 or 3 characters.
• I see the effectiveness lost on large column values, it could be that only up to say 30 characters is optimal, I see strings of 100+ characters would be ineffective.
• It doesn’t support case-sensitive searching or non ASCII searching

The Tests

• Create good sized table and distribution of first/last names (A IMDB Actors table would work)
• Create a concatenated column of searchable fields (e.g. details = CONCAT_WS(‘ ‘,firstname,lastname)
• Create function to return bitwised search string (e.g. bitize(str))
• Create Indexed bitwise column and pre-populate accordingly (e.g. bitfulldetails)
• Create BEFORE INSERT|BEFORE UPDATE Triggers to populate Indexed bitwised column
• Test the sucker (of course you will need to include the actual LIKE command as well in the WHERE clause)

A sample query would then be:


SELECT columns
FROM users
WHERE bitize('str') & bitfulldetails
AND fulldetails like '%str%'


So the challenge to all those budding MySQL Gurus, does it seem plausible?

At a customer site recently I came across the following table definition for an Innodb table. 140 columns, 3 part primary key totally 44 bytes, 2 million rows giving over 900MB in data size. And it had 15 indexes, totaling over 2.3GB in size. Add into the mix a Windows Server 2003 OS, 640MB innodb_buffer_pool_size setting and table scans out the warzoo. This all leads to very poor performance.

In is generally considered best practice for Innodb to use the shortest primary key as possible, and there is a clear reason for this. Innodb stores with every index the full primary key. So for example if an indexed column was 4 bytes in length, in this example the index row would be 48 bytes (before overhead). Fortunately an easy solution presented itself, because of this index storage requirement, Innodb will create an internal 6 byte primary key if none exists for a table. I of course had known about this but had never tried it in a production situation. I come from old school where every table is defined with a primary key.

So a ALTER TABLE [name] DROP PRIMARY KEY results in a long wait, and a reduction in the Index size to 900MB. WOOT! Now, in closer analysis the Primary Key is the Primary Key because it’s the Unique requirement for the table. No problem I just add a Unique Key to replace the previously dropped Primary Key. A check to review the Index Size showed a size of 2.3GB. What the!

It seems if you read the fine print of the MySQL documentation for Innodb Table Structures there is an exception clause. If you do not define a PRIMARY KEY for your table, MySQL picks the first UNIQUE index that has only NOT NULL columns as the primary key and InnoDB uses it as the clustered index.

In my situation, by adding a Unique Key this was in turn converted internally to the new Primary Key. Drat! So to the Innodb developers out there. I’d like to see a way for the internally generated key to remain in this situation, or at least provide the ability for the designer to choose this capability.

The only result is to physically create an INTEGER UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY column definition. This may seem like not a big thing, but the customer did not want to make any schema changes. However it was a necessity simply as the first step to get reasonable performance.

This was only the first part of the problem, solving the full table scans via creative Indexing was not possible, code changes were out of the question for an immediate fix. The real problem was the size of the innodb_buffer_pool_size. It was just too small to handle both the table data and index pages in memory. Perfmon analysis showed the machine simply when into intensive disk I/O every time any queries were run. On a Linux system with just a database and Innodb tables, it can be recommended that 70-80% of available memory can be allocated to the innodb_buffer_pool_size.

Alas this is Windows 32 bit, and their is an implied 2GB memory limit for any process, so the best one could manage in this situation was 1600MB.
The long and the short was that even with poor database design, and immediate performance improvement occurred with an optimal Primary Key and sufficient memory allocated to the correct MySQL buffers. This is only a temporary fix for a greater problem.

I’m interested to know what people consider will behold MySQL in 2007?

The announcement of “You” as Time person of the year can only considered a huge boost to the opportunities in 2007. So, in 2007 here are my 7 (in no significant order).

1. 2007 will be the year of the storage engine. We will see 5 offerings for transactional storage engines, 20+ available and practical engines for management of some form of data.
2. 2007 will see MySQL 5.1 GA (finally).
3. 2007 will see MySQL release it’s own Falcon Storage Engine (GA not until Q4 :-().
4. The MySQL Winter of Code will enable the contributions of the community to change feature development. I foresee a Bounty system from an external party or parties for MySQL Features emerging.
5. MySQL will make major press inroads to the RDBMS Big 3 of Oracle, SQL Server and IBM DB2.
6. Despite efforts of MySQL AB, major installations of MySQL 4.0 and 4.1 including large ISP’s will hamper the uptake of 5.0 and 5.1 and the de-commissioning of 4.x
7. A major country government will make an announcement to move to Open Source across servers and desktops, and MySQL will contribute to being an enterprise database offering in systems replacements as part of a longer term strategy.

Frank was on a role with MySQL quotes (it’s 1am here in New York – All that Red Bull & Vodka). Here are some of them:

I’ve also done some of my own shirts designs (see small images below), a number I already have on shirts (you can check them out on me at MySQL Camp).

Some other references include MySQL forge Merchandise and Arjen’s suggestions.

Unlike fellow author Giuseppe of last week’s Log Buffer #12 I volunteered for the job of this week’s Log Buffer. Lots to say, so little time, so lets get started with Log Buffer #13.

Tom Kyte has been at the DBForum 2006 in Denmark. Apart from the contents of the Forum, his picture and comment “I spied some artifacts from Mogens Oracle Museum, a copy of the Version 3 and Version 4 Oracle” in Dbforum 2006, in the past… was an impressive look back in time. Manuals, what are they? So how old is this? Wikipedia History places Oracle Version 4 at 1984, some 22 years ago. One of the comments to Tom’s entry takes us to Back to the future (Oracle 4.1 VM appliance). The title gives the article’s content away, but worth a view of Oracle history. Good to also see Tom won the 42 Question Quiz on day 1, but what was the question he got wrong?

Ric Smith gives us a window of this month’s upcoming Oracle Open World with some details of Oracle Open World 2006 – Oracle Develop, “a new event tailored for the “geek” in us all. The format will make for a more developer-oriented conference”. Craig Mullins is at the European International DB2 User Group conference being held in Vienna this week (must be the month for RDBMS conferences). Details of his presentation “Change Control for DB2 Access Paths” are at IDUG in Vienna.

Build Your Own Oracle RAC Cluster on Linux – Again references a very detailed article and explanation by Jeffrey Hunter on RAC and shows the benefit by contributions to the OTN Oracle Community. If you’re heading to Oracle Open World this month, Justin Kestelyn mentions details of a similar presentation being held during the “Oracle on Linux Experience” portion of OTN Night on Monday Oct 23.

David Aldridge in his article Linux 2.6 Kernel I/O Schedulers for Oracle Data Warehousing: Part II has received some good responses in his concise and simple Benchmark. I always strive for simplicity in solving problems and this looks like a good simple approach to graphing I/O.

A little off the beaten track is Applying Web 2.0 to the Enterprise by Jonathan Bruce. The reason why I mention this is two fold. Firstly, decisions made by Project Management can have a big effect on the software development process, and this can have a significant effect on the DBAs and System Administrators that support systems. The article also mentions Agile Software Development of which I am a strong proponent. As I have a very detailed database background I’m also wary of some of the “strenghts” mentioned generally with Agile. A topic I’m happy to discuss more at some time.

E A D G B E. I have no idea what that means, you will need to read Ian Thain’s article regarding the Sybase WorkSpace to find out. He publishes some healthy performance improvement throughput figures with his 3 tuning guidelines.

Firebird 2.00 Release Candidate 5 has also been released this week. The news article indicates that this will probably become the release version.

Peter Scott reminds us that with all the technology advances and an existing 8 year old system which includes documentation, things still happen in I hate on call.

Greg Sabino Mullane over at Planet PostgreSQL is keeping abreast of the various open source offerings with his report on Berkeley DB now does MVCC. His comment “Looks like Oracle is actually doing something with their purchase …. Curiously, this comes right at the point when MySQL is dropping the BDB engine from their product.”. Hmmm, interesting observation, however it wasn’t the actual reason why BDB was dropped from MySQL. The actual reason mentioned some time ago can be found at BDB Engine removal.

Are we working in a booming industry? “Overall, Gartner is predicting that the worldwide DBMS market is around $14 billion and will continue to grow by nearly 7% per year”. This comment by Zack Urlocker is from his attendance of the “Gartner Open Source Summit - a very thorough analysis of the impact of open source technology in the database market.” You can read all his comments of the summit in Gartner Mastermind panel and Gartner on Open Source Databases.

Exploring the secrets of intermediate materialization by Adam Machanic revives a trick he had in SQL Server 2000 in improving logical reads when query tuning. This example shows it’s operation in SQL Server 2005.

Peter Zaitsev gives us a quick refresher on his MySQL Performance Blog with What to tune in MySQL Server after installation. A good introduction reference of configurable system variables, particularly for those non-MySQL DBA’s that need to also support a MySQL installation. Mike Kruckenberg also gives us a valuable consolidated reference in his twin articles, Guide to Incompatibilities when Upgrading MySQL to Version 4.1 and Guide to Incompatibilities when Upgrading MySQL to Version 5.0. Essential reading for clearly understanding MySQL database upgrades and possible traps.

MySQL Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.0.1 beta has been released. Enough said. Ok, well for those that want some more detail, I quote from Reggie Burnett – a downloadable plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 that allows Windows developers to quickly build MySQL data-driven applications with Visual Studio. With this plug-in, developers will be able to create, modify and manage MySQL database objects with an easy-to-use interface from within the Visual Studio IDE.. If only I used Microsoft I could check it out!

Daniel Schneller highlights one of the problems in a large scale out MySQL implementation in his article MySQL replication timeout trap. Valuable information in a network infrastructure to ensure your slaves are performing optimally.

Normally I’d summarise a worthy article for review, this time I’ve reproduced the concise summary by Jason Gaylord in Preventing SQL Injection Attacks which explains his content. Scott Guthrie just posted some really good stuff about preventing SQL injection attacks. In his blog post he talks about an application that Michael Sutton created to check SQL injection attacks by screening Google search and looking for sites with QueryString, etc. Check out his post for more details: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/30/tip_2f00_trick_3a00_-guard-against-sql-injection-attacks.aspx

Of the big 5 or 6 RDBMS products of the past 2 decades, DB2 is the only one that hasn’t crossed my path in some way. Willie Favero writes What’s in a name – The saga continues…, sharing his views on the official name of DB2® Version 9 for z/OS.

Jeremy Cole has been busy in recent months with his new found freedoms in his new venture Proven Scaling. He has released another MySQL Source Patch with On Triggers, Stored Procedures, and Call Stacks. Keep em comin’ Jeremy. And just as I complete this weeks Log Buffer, good mate Jay (the plumber) Pipes has published HOWTO: Making a Corresponding Test Case for your Patch. Very worthy information for all those past, present and future patch writers.

The Data Charmer Giuseppe Maxia gives us the inside goss on his recent vacation interests in Take the MySQL Certification in five steps. Good Advice, I liked Point 5, and the unofficial Point 6. Marcus Popp also points us to New Lists of Certified Candidates online so you can see your name in lights. Reminds me to stop procrastinating and to take the MySQL 5 exams myself. It’s been on the cards for a few months now.

We end this week with one of those feel good stories of something that inspires me. Paul McCullagh has written his own MySQL transactional storage engine. PBXT beta 0.97 has just been released as a Pluggable storage engine for MySQL 5.1. Quoting Paul “PBXT is the first full featured engine to be released in this form.”. This leverages a new feature in the upcoming MySQL 5.1 GA release where developers can use MySQL’s extensible Storage Engine Architecture as a plugin without the need for recompiling with MySQL source. Look out for a lot more opportunities in storing and access different types of data in the future with this feature. [Author Side Note: Compiling MySQL from the latest BK tree may contain code features that are not fully tested (e.g. 2 Oct 2006). It’s best when integrating other patches or plugins to use a known MySQL Source Snapshots, otherwise things may break!]

And with a certain amount of deja vu from last week’s closing Log Buffer #12 comment by Giuseppe, your’s truly will also be joining MySQL. Checkout my If you can’t beat them, join them.

That’s all for lucky #13. Thanks for the opportunity Dave.

Like fellow friends and MySQL’ers before me Morgan, Roland, Giuseppe, Markus and Sean, I’ve joined the MySQL juggernaut on the ride of my life, achieving two of my short/medium term professional goals in one step. Woot!

It says something to me about the company I’m very excited to work for when I knew of all these people before they joined MySQL this year (2006). I’ll also be joining other friends and MySQL people Arjen, Jon, Jay, Colin, Michael Z and I still have a list of friends that I’ve met while being part of the MySQL community.

And as Giuseppe said I’ll be working in a virtual company. Another article I like to tell others about MySQL is MySQL: Workers in 25 countries with no HQ.

I’ll leave you with the MySQL Values from the Company About MySQL AB page.

Following my User Group Presentation I was asked by fellow MySQLer Kim about Logical Data Modelling (LDM), in relation to Physical Data Modelling.

Well, first the brain had to work overtime to remember when was the last time I worked on a Logical Data Model. The answer to that is 1996 doing R&D work for Oracle Corporation with their CASE repository tool, Oracle Designer, about version 1.3/1.3.2. I’ve learnt in the past 10 years to purge technical stuff from my brain, leading from the capacity in be able to remember in detail data models, data migration and data cleansing issues of projects even after leaving them 3 years eariler.

As Kim pointed out, he thinks physically, actually directly at the SQL level, then working backwards to produce an appropiate physical model. To think logically is to consider the entities and attributes and relations before considering the physical tables, columns and relationships. So how do you program somebody to think logically? In the case with Kim, he is undertaking formal studies after already grasping the concepts of software development. Generally today more people don’t undertake the formal education and we end up with The Hobbist and the Professional Syndrome.

I guess in summary I’d argue why bother. Does anybody still do traditional logical models? Feedback/comments are welcome. (Professionally I believe there is a place for LDM).
However for the purpose of the exercise lets start with a Physical Representation and present a Logical Representation of that to see the differences.

From this you can see a classic Library example, showing a table of Books and a Table of Authors, and an intersection table (3NF) to indicate that a Book can have one to many Authors, and likewise an Author can have one to many Books.

So how would this have been represented in a Logical Model.

Some things to consider in Logical Modelling.

• Attributes really only require a name, and perhaps just a datatype using number, string, date (Jim Starkey would be happy), but nothing specific like SMALLINT, or VARCHAR(50).
• An Attributes Mandatory/Optional state may or may not be known
• Information is not in 3NF. i.e. relationships can be many to many (in our example, there is no concept of the intersection table

I’m going from memory here, so there is probably more points to consider.

So how do you teach this when you are trying to work backwards, when I learnt this back in 1988 (some 18 years ago), I’d never created a database or used SQL so I didn’t have the history. Arjen had a brilliant idea to consider Logical Modelling after the fact. Views. Consider an end user requirement for Reporting, and how you would represent your model better to an end user (effectively de-normalising these views so users don’t have to know about joins).

In this case you would create a view of Books and a View of Authors. Details such as mandatory/optional isn’t important to the end user report (ie, it’s not like it’s needed to be enforced), and specific datatype details again are not that important. The basics to know how to format a number or a date works.

An interesting approach that worked well in our explaining.

The Text Book

So it was interesting to go back to the text book using C.J. Date’s An Introduction to Database Systems to review definitions.

Logically isn’t really referenced, the term used is conceptual. A conceptual definition is “The right way to do database design is to get the logical design right first, without paying any attention whatsoever at that stage to physical – that is, performance – considerations”

Also for example Third Normal Form we get from Section 12.3 First, Second and Third Normal Forms.

Third normal form (very informal definition): A relvar is in 3NF if and only if the monkey attributes (if any) are both:

• a. Mutually independent
• b. Irreducibly dependent on the primary key

We explain the terms nonkey attribute and mutually independend (loosely) as follows:

• A nonkey attribute is any attribute that does not participate in the primary key of the relvar concerned.
• Two or more attributes are mutually independent if none of them is functionally dependent on any combination of the others. Such independence implies that each attributes can be updated independently of the rest.

Man, no wonder many years of experience and having generally seen most cases, enables me to forget this and not feel like I’ve fogotten something.

Well, now I have your attention, Slow Queries are bad (unless it’s a single user system and you don’t care). However there are worse things then slow queries in a large enterprise system.

I’ve been asked in recent weeks a number of questions which has brought this topic to discussion, as well as a current implementation I’m undertaking for a client of a purchased product.

High volume repetitive queries can have a worse effect on your system’s performance. Combined with slow queries that take locks, these queries can have an extreme effect on performance and if you don’t know your application, or have the right tools, it can be initially hard to diagonise easily.

This problem is the classic Wasting CPU cycles problem, seen it before, will see it again.

Here’s a classic example for reference. Using the current product that I’m customising and installing (I’ve not be involved in any development), a typical Customer Information System (CIS).

The system when deployed will have 1.1 Million Customers. Each Customer has a Balance. Now the Customer Balance is not recorded against the customer record, it’s calculated every time it’s required. So, no big deal, well yes. The stored procedure to calculate the balance hit’s 4 different tables, and one of these tables is one of the largest in the system (recording all detailed financial transactions). Multiple batch reports alone that work with large sets of customers all require or use the current balance in some means.

There are only a small set of transactions that affect the balance including Invoice Statements, Payments, Adjustments, Credit Control, Write-Offs . These processes by there own nature are either batch or small online transactions. The calculation of the balance can be applied against the Chunk of customers in a batch, or individual Row for online transactions (See The RAT and the CAT).

Even for the paranoid, the re-calculation of the customer balance for all customers in batch is more efficient after hours, yet only customers where some transaction that has been applied since the last time the re-calculation ran is necessary.

MySQL doesn’t be default have any analysis tools to identify and manage these types of queries. Peter Zaitsev in his article Slow Query Log analyzes tools highlights the issue with a good approach by a source code change to long_query_time as well as some additional scripts.

Hopefully MySQL will consider a more improved approach in future releases that doesn’t require patching the source code. Now it’s unlikely that MySQL will do another SHOW STATUS Gotcha and for example change the unit of measure from seconds to milliseconds, but they could make it a float, so you could specify 0.1 for example.

Well, it’s Sunday night so I will put this down to being the weekend. The background to being caught out is a request I made to my local Users Group mailing list for some information on people’s environments because I wanted to some empirical data analysis without having any more knowledge of the systems.

In summary (without the surrounding fan-fare, I was seeking):

SELECT VERSION();
SHOW STATUS;
SHOW VARIABLES;  // Optional

I was however perplexed why my first data point analysis (Read/Write ratio) using the Status values Com_insert, Com_update, Com_delete and Com_select was not always giving me expected results. In particular, a number of server results showed 0 for values while I knew the results came from working MySQL environments.

So, sanity check with good friend Morgan and I get the response to answer the dilemma SHOW STATUS defaults to session based statistics in 5.0+, there’s a million people it’s caught out, and many bugs about “xyz variable not being incremented”.

Well, it’s Sunday night so I will put this down to being the weekend. The background to being caught out is a request I made to my local Users Group mailing list for some information on people’s environments because I wanted to some empirical data analysis without having any more knowledge of the systems.

So I’m really seeking:

SELECT VERSION();
SHOW GLOBAL STATUS;
SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES;  // Optional

Well, that’s my MySQL trivia point for the day. MySQL between version 4.1 and 5.0 made a major change with the default value. The MySQL 5.0 Manual also states this.

UPDATE 23 Sep 2006

Following Eric’s Show @&!# status again!, I did then read the Bug #19093, and it was great to see Monty comment (that’s open source for you, enabling even founders to mix with the common folk), and I’d tend to agree to his comments. MySQL has attempted to correct something.

Perhaps the best compromise to the problem is to deprecate and drop the SHOW STATUS command, and make the scope component GLOBAL|SESSION compulsory, so SHOW GLOBAL STATUS or SHOW SESSION STATUS are the only valid commands!

No, it’s not a bedtime story, is a serious system’s design concept and I’m amazing that people don’t know about this.
As I mentioned in If you don’t know your data, you don’t know your application I was doing a Java Code Review, and I found a clear case of a much simplier solution. How simple you ask?

Well, without completing the task 100%, I achieved in less then 1 day (and lets say for the argument 1 more day of work), what is being worked on by somebody else for a week, with an estimate of 2 more weeks to complete. So let’s add 50% to my estimate, that’s a total of 3 days verses 15 days. You do the math. and yes that was last week and that task is still being worked on the same way, even with reference to my working code. Not to mention the code is a similiar magnitude of simplicity, and simplicity means cost savings in support, people so quickly forget that.

So what is this RAT and CAT:

• RAT – Row At a Time
• CAT – Chunk At a Time

This concept is really rather simple, however it’s amazing how implementations never consider this. Let me give you a simple example.

Your importing some external data (a flat file of 5 columns, and is inturn will be stored in 2 tables in a normalised form). So the RAT way of doing things would entail:

• Using the language in question, open the file, read line by line, converting into object for reference.
• Now for each row read you
  • You get the values (A and B), and then do a select to see if this row already exists in one of the normalised tables (calling in X). If it does, you have the surrogate key, else you insert the row and get the surrogate key
  • Now you do the same with the next set of values (C, D, E) which reference the normalised values (A and B), inserting into Y)
  • And so on and so on.
  • Report exceptions line by line if found

For those now laughing, it’s not really funny, it’s sad that programs are written this way. For those that say, but that’s the only way, well welcome to a different, radical and hard to learn approach.

The Cat way of doing things would entail:

• Create a temporary table
• Bulk load the data into the temporary table via appropiate command, e.g. mysqlimport or LOAD DATA.
• Using one select, insert into X rows from temporary table that are not already present
• Using one select, insert into Y rows from the temporart table that are not present, joining to X to get the appropiate surrogate key
• Report exceptions via one select of data that wasn’t inserted due to some rules

It’s not rocket science people.

I should mention this is a simple example, and it’s not always possible to do CAT processing for all operations, but generally some portion of batch work can be, and the remaining must be done in a RAT way.

Updated
Some more recent articles including We need more CATs (2009) and The Art of Elimination (2010)

The art of data modelling is definitely lost on some [most] people, or they never found it, even though they think they did. Over dinner with good friend Morgan last night we were swapping present stories on the topic.

Morgan wrote recently about I want my 4 bytes back damn it., and interesting example storing an ISBN. Further reference can be found at Getting started with MySQL of a more impractical ISBN example.

Disk is cheap now, so the attitude and poor excuse can be, well a few extra bytes doesn’t matter. Well no! If your a social hacker and have a website with a maximium concurrent connections of 2 maybe, but much like some recent Java Code Reviewing I just performed, just because the system isn’t 24×7, doesn’t give you excuse to be lazy about writing the code not to handle concurrency, thread safety and also as efficient as possible, in this case RAT verses CAT. (I’ll need to write about this, it seemed to go over some of the other professionals even)

I can remember a very specific example some 10 years ago in doing some performance analysis on a site. I’d identified the need for an additional index on a table. Now this table was sized for 200 million rows, and it already had about 70 million. The problem was adding another index required 4GB disk allocation. These things have an effect on sizing, growth and backups.

So the impact on appropiate sizing can clearly have an effect, if it was just one poorly sized column that’s acceptable (just), but normally it’s a pattern that litters a data model.

What’s important to realise is, it’s not just diskspace, it’s also memory. Without really touching on sizing data, I did mention some examples previously in Improving Open Source Databases – WordPress. Here the use of BIGINT(20) for primary keys proved my point. That’s 8 bytes, but unless you have going to have 4 billion categories, it’s a waste. It’s a waste when it’s a foreign key in a table, and it’s a big waste when it’s indexed, and that index is then in memory, and wasting more precious resources.

So how to do identify when the designer of the model has no idea about the intrinsic data value being stored? If you see tables with VARCHAR(255), that’s a clear sign. They have no idea regarding the data, so a default limit is used. Morgan referred to it as “Shooting guns in the dark with your eyes closed”. Books don’t help the cause, I was just skimming High Performance MySQL last night (one of the many freebies from the UC). There on page 82, is a table definition with not one column, but two with varchar(255). Hmmm!

If you see any new applications with VARHAR(255) they are even more lost, because MySQL 5, which has been around quite some time now, supports VARCHAR(65535). Speaking of that, has anybody seen VARCHAR(65535). I’d like to know.

Another example, is in Sheeri’s Top 8 SQL Best Practices Point 4 in regards to storing IP’s effeciently. If you log for example every page hit, this can be your largest table, and moving from varchar(15) to int can save you upto 11 bytes per row alone.

These may just be simple examples, but it’s the principle. When you define a column, consider it’s data, if you don’t know then take the time to do the reasearch and learn.

I’ve recently completed a contract and I’ve been in discussions with agents and other employers for further work. Having had one of the worse experiences in my previous work, I’ve been extra careful to ensure what I’m told at the interview/meeting stage is indeed true and accurate (in my last case it was not). I’ve also not made the assumption that an organisation that is dependent on software has placed a certain level of value on what’s in place. (in my last case I did, simply due to the size of the organisation and volume of business).

So, when being asked by people what I’m seeking, outside of the technical skills and compendencies, I’m seeking an organisation that places value on it’s existing software, it’s software quality, it’s software improvement and most importantly it’s software developers. It was unfortunate that for an organisation that lived in software, and would not survive long (especially at the present scale of operations) without it, they met none of these criteria. It was really sad, and overall I found the environment “depressing”.

Now “depressing” could be considered a harsh word, but it comes from both my ethos and also present circumstances in life. I had these two post-it notes on my wall at work, which summed up “What I was seeking/Where I wanted to be”, and “Where I was” in my job.

There have been a few articles recently, it was probably Marcus in Supporting ideas and being productive, based on earlier articles of How to Come Up With Ideas and How To Kill Good Ideas by Zack that motivated me to publish this. These articles have many good points, and while I could put my slant on it, I wanted to focus on just one thing.

In Software Development 10 years ago I was driven, now I know and I’m driven by passion. I always strive for something better then their presently is, seeking better quality, and better productivity, and most importantly today, simplicity.

Everybody is at a different position in life and it’s important to find the right fit. For me money is not a motivator, being productive, making what I’m doing better, where I’m working more enjoyable and productive, and who I’m working with a better place to be are important to me.

I’ve choose the word for the moment to best represent this as PRIDE.

Pride is:

• A sense of one’s own proper dignity or value; self-respect
• Pleasure or satisfaction taken in an achievement, possession, or association
• A cause or source of pleasure or satisfaction; the best of a group or class
• The most successful or thriving condition
• To indulge (oneself) in a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction

For me, I’m seeking an organisation that takes pride in it’s people, it’s products and it’s future direction, and that attracts people that have pride in what they do, they way they think and how they interact with others.

I’m playing with the latest 5.1.11 beta in a master/slave replication situation. Given a lack of H/W lying around I’m configuring a mixed H/W setup to leverage an existing office’s after hours CPUs running Windows XP for my slaves. So here is my test setup.

Server

Linux – 192.168.100.170

The following are the relevent my.cnf settings

[mysqld]
port=3307
server-id = 1
log-bin=mysql-bin

Confirming the server. I did some test commands prior to confirm the position.

$ mysql -uroot -p mysql
Your MySQL connection id is 47 to server version: 5.1.11-beta-log
mysql> show master status;
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| File             | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| mysql-bin.000001 |     1759 |              |                  |
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+

Slave

Windows XP – 192.168.100.171

The following are the relevent my.cnf settings

server-id	= 11
master-host     = 192.168.100.170
master-user     = rep
master-password = dolphin
master-port     = 3307

Test

I’ve taken a few steps back for the documentation, to clearly identify any setup problems for those that are also reviewing this to setup replication.

Starting the Slave, I get the following error.

060720 16:36:22 [ERROR] Slave I/O thread: error connecting to master '[email protected]:3307':
  Error: 'Host '192.168.100.171' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server'
  errno: 1130  retry-time: 60  retries: 86400

Makes sense, you need to give access to the slave to access the master. So to the uninitiated you may miss that a slave requires different access then a default ‘all’ for example.

On the master.

$ mysql -uroot -p mysql
mysql>  grant replication slave on *.* to rep@'192.168.100.%' identified by 'dolphin';

Just a side note, when defining the master replication you can specifically state databases to include or ignore, but to set up the appropiate grant on a particular database fails. For example:

mysql> grant replication slave on test.* to rep@'192.168.100.%' identified by 'dolphin';
ERROR 1221 (HY000): Incorrect usage of DB GRANT and GLOBAL PRIVILEGES

But the problem was not indeed here, looking closer at the error message, the host and the port matched the my.cnf file, but the user didn’t. It was ‘root’ when it should have been ‘rep’.

So, some advice later from the Planet MySQL #IRC (thanks Sheeri) you find if you RTFM at MySQL 5.1 Manual – Replication Startup Options.

So investigating the master.info file located in the slave data directory I get:

14
mysql-bin.000001
1839
192.168.100.170
root
dolphin
3307
60
0

There is a mismatch between the master.info file and the my.cnf file. I don’t recall the exact series of events when I setup the Windows XP installation, I know I first tested it as a master, and it’s most likely I then configured the slave settings, but used a master-user of ‘root’ initially and started the server. Then thinking this was insecure before I’d created the permissions, I changed the my.cnf file to use the user ‘rep’.

So the lessons today are:

1. Correctly configure your slave settings before starting the mysql server for the first time.
2. MySQL records slave replication authentication information in two files, the my.cnf and the master.info.
3. Making changes to my.cnf are not reflected in an existing master.info. In this situtation use the CHANGE MASTER TO command in addition.
4. Read the Manual. MySQL does have good documentation, and when it’s not quite right, like I found yesterday with Bug #21134, report it to help everybody in the future.

Now I fully agree this is a Replication 101 error. My excuse is the last replication I setup was in 2003 under 3.23, and it worked perfectly well in a production system for 2 years with a number of 3.23 and 4.0 slaves. Hence while I’m just refreshing my replication skills now.