My MySQL Conference Submission 2010: Workarounds

Stupid INFORMATION_SCHEMA tricks

I like http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/11/24/using-information_schema-instead-of-shell-scripting/

Re: Stupid INFORMATION_SCHEMA tricks

Yes - good one!

I think the article misses the power of this trick, which is that you can (easily) xargs the resulting SQL to replay to MySQL concurrently (see -P option to set number of parallel threads).

This means that you can repair MyISAM tables concurrently, or run OPTIMIZE on your fragmented InnoDB tables with the least downtime.

Re: Stupid INFORMATION_SCHEMA tricks

Example here:
http://glynndba.blogspot.com/2009/09/sql-from-sql.html

So, you have 3 workarounds of your own, 3 from other people, and are soliciting more from the community?

That doesn't really give me confidence in you...frankly I'd expect the Percona folks to be full of workarounds (since mysqlperformanceblog.com has lots of them). If you can't be bothered to do research on your own company's blog, how good is the presentation going to be?

Also, how good are *you* as an expert consultant DBA for Percona if you don't have tons of workarounds like this? Someone like Peter Z. has tons of them, since most of the workaround posts are his.....

I expect a speaker at a conference to be an expert in what they're talking about. I've thought it was lame in the past when a supposed expert gets a talk accepted and then asks the community "what do you want to see?" or "how have you solved this issue?"

It's too late once your talk is accepted; you're supposed to be an expert already! Otherwise you look like you have no idea what you're talking about and have to ask the community, and most of us have never spoken before at all, much less at *THE* MySQL conference.

"So, you have 3 workarounds of your own, 3 from other people, and are soliciting more from the community?"

Yes, I'm asking people for input. My list wasn't meant to be exhaustive - I don't know why you have to jump on me for leading in with a few of my favorites as a teaser.

It's completely fair game to ask people what they want to hear about. As well as the speaker being technical, they also have to be relevant.

Did you forget your coffee this morning?

Workarounds...indeed a topic every developer working with MySQL will have had to deal with. Anyway, here's one I recently updated:

http://forge.mysql.com/tools/tool.php?id=246

(it gets the original code for a view, instead of the punctuation noise you get out of the information_schema.VIEWS table)

Nice tip ;) It reminds me of a bug from the SHOW CREATE TABLE output from partitioned tables pushed in just before GA:

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=14326

At least partitioning syntax is now readable.

The Infobright community has put together some workarounds for the community edition, such as using a stored procedure or mysql_proxy to replace CREATE TABLE .. AS SELECT.