boolean.co.nz » MySQL

Find the size of all databases on a server

Boolean — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:49:33 +0000

A quick way to create a view to show file size statistics across databases on a server.

DROP VIEW IF EXISTS alldb;
CREATE VIEW AllDatabases AS
SELECT
s.schema_name AS ‘Schema’,
SUM (t.data_length) AS Data,
SUM ( t.index_length ) AS Indexes,
SUM (t.data_length) + SUM (t.index_length) AS ‘Mb Used’,
IF (SUM(t.data_free)=0,”,SUM (t.data_free)) As ‘Mb Free’,
IF (SUM(t.data_free)=0,”, 100 * (SUM (t.data_length) + SUM (t.index_length)) / ((SUM (t.data_length)+SUM (t.index_length) + SUM (IFNULL(t.data_free,0))) ) ) AS ‘Pct Used’, COUNT (table_name) AS Tables
FROM information_schema.schemata s
LEFT JOIN information_schema.tables t ON s.schema_name = t.table_schema
GROUP BY s.schema_name
WITH ROLLUP

Exporting a MySQL Database Schema as XML

Boolean — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:10:12 +0000

Dumping a database schema is a an often required quick task. This script will read the schema from a MySQL database, and output it XML to describe it.

// Define a few constants
define(“DB_SERVER”, “localhost”);
define(“DB_USER”, “root”);
define(“DB_PASS”, “password”);
define(“DB_NAME”, “example”);

// Lets connect to the db
$dbhandle = mysql_connect(DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS)
or die(“Unable to connect to MySQL”);

// Choose a database to work with
$selected = mysql_select_db(DB_NAME, $dbhandle)
or die(“Could not select examples”);
// Return all of the available tables
$result_tbl = mysql_query( “SHOW TABLES FROM “.DB_NAME, $dbhandle );

$tables = array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result_tbl)) {
$tables[] = $row[0];
}

$output = “\n”;
$output .= “”;

// Now iterate through each table and return the fields
foreach ( $tables as $table ) {
$output .= “

”;
$result_fld = mysql_query( “SHOW FIELDS FROM “.$table, $dbhandle );

while( $row1 = mysql_fetch_row($result_fld) ) {
$output .= “ $output .= ($row1[3] == “PRI”) ? ” primary_key=\”yes\” />” : ” />”;
}

$output .= “

”;
}

$output .= “”;

// Notify the browser the type of file being dealt with
header(“Content-type: text/xml”);
// Display the XML to describe the schema
echo $output;

// Dont forget to close the connection
mysql_close($dbhandle);
?>

Remember, this is an example, and real world code should escape characters, follow best security practices etc. Proof of concept code here, – not a snippet to put live.

Scheduling mySQL backups

Boolean — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:31:55 +0000

I’m sure there is no need to explain the virtues of regular backups. Below are three steps to peace of mind

1) Configure a backup directory on the server

mkdir /var/lib/backupfolder
cd /var/lib/backupfolder

2) Make a backup script

vi mysqlbackup.sh

#!/bin/sh
# MySQL server username goes here
USERNAME=”username”
# MySQL server password goes here
PASSWORD=”password”
# List of DBNAMES for Backup
DBNAME=”dbname”
#date timestamp used in the log
DATE=`/bin/date +%Y-%m-%d_%Hh%Mm`
# format the output file
OUTDIR=”/var/lib/backupfolder/”
OUTFILE=”ip_bindass”.$DATE.”sql.gz”
#working directory
DIR=”/var/lib/backupfolder/”
#cd $DIR
# Do the MySQL Backup
/usr/bin/mysqldump –database $DBNAME –opt –single-transaction -u$USERNAME -p$PASSWORD | /usr/bin/gzip -9 > $OUTDIR$OUTFILE

Dont forget to change permissions

chmod +x mysqlbackup.sh

3) Schedule the backup in crontab

crontab -e

Add something along the lines of:

30 23 * * * /var/lib/backupfolder/mysqlbackup.sh

To backup at 11:30PM every day. Just as important as to backup up is to test restores; – it’s no good having backups and feeling at ease if you cant recover in the event of catastrophe!

Help keep the internet free

Boolean — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:44:48 +0000

A big part of the Internet is built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python). Now Oracle is trying to buy Sun, which owns MySQL.

It’s not in the Internet users interest that one key piece of the net would be owned by an entity that has more to gain by severely limiting and in the long run even killing it as an open source product than by keeping it alive. If Oracle were allowed to acquire MySQL, we would be looking at less competition among databases, which will mean higher license and support prices. In the end it’s always the consumers and the small businesses that have to pay the bills, in this case to Oracle.

Read on here at Monty’s blog (creator of MySQL) or head here for the official website.

Using LIMIT when querying a single row

Boolean — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:49:07 +0000

Sometimes you know you are only looking for one row when you are querying your tables. It may be that you are fetching a unique record or checking the existence of any number of records that satisfy your WHERE clause.

Adding LIMIT 1 to your query can increase performance in this situation; – the database engine will stop scanning for records after it finds just one, instead of going through the whole table or index.

For example:

$record = mysql_query(“SELECT username FROM user WHERE country = ‘UK’”);
if (mysql_num_rows($record) > 0) {
// …
}

Can become:

$record = mysql_query(“SELECT username FROM user WHERE country = ‘UK’ LIMIT 1″);
if (mysql_num_rows($record) > 0) {
// …
}

Maxlength for MySQL TEXT field types

Boolean — Fri, 08 May 2009 08:33:56 +0000

MySQL supports four TEXT field types (TINYTEXT, TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT and LONGTEXT)

MyISAM tables in MySQL have a maximum row size 65,535 bytes and all the data in a row must fit within that limit.

Luckily however TEXT field types are stored outside of the table itself and thus only contribute 9 – 12 bytes towards that limit.

MySQL date_format

Boolean — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:48:56 +0000

I always seem to be digging around to find MySQL’s date formatting syntax, so here is a couple of common conversions…

select date_format(date, ‘%d %M %Y’) as new_date from tablename

where date is the name of your date field, and new_date is the variable name which you can use to reference the value.

date_format String	Example
‘%e/%c/%Y’	25/4/2009
‘%c/%e/%Y’	4/25/2009
‘%d/%m/%Y’	25/04/2009
‘%m/%d/%Y’	04/25/2009
‘%a %D %b %Y’	Fri 25th Apr 2009

A more complete list of specifiers is available here.

MySQL PHP & UTF-8

Boolean — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:32:43 +0000

Its been a while but I was getting characters like Â£ instead of £ (for example) and it took a quick refresher to realise what was going on. A fantastic background reading is available here.

So what is going on?
UTF-8 uses one or more 8-bit bytes to store a single character, whereas ASCII for example uses only one byte per character. This makes it more space-efficient than UTF-16 or UTF-32 as the majority of characters can be single byte encoded but with the added benefit that you can store any character, – should you need to. It uses the most significant bits of each byte as continuation bits (to signify that the following byte(s) form part of the same character) and it this is the reason that improperly displayed UTF-8 results in weird characters.

OK, enough history, – lets just fix it!
The solution is to make sure you set the character set correctly with a Content-type header.

Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8

So now that we are ready to store UTF-8 data we store some rows of data and output to the browser looks fine. However, is it really?

MySQL needs to know the character set of the data sent to it in your queries. The default connection character set is ISO 8859-1 (latin1) — treating all your supplied data as if it was ISO 8859-1, which is then automatically converted to the underlying character set of the column (UTF-8 in our case). Taking our earlier example this means that the two-byte pound sign is perceived as two ISO 8859-1 characters: Â and £. MySQL will then encode these characters separately as UTF-8 requiring 2 bytes each – double encoding as we use 4 bytes to store a single pound character! When selecting data from the table, the reverse occurs when MySQL converts the UTF-8 back into ISO 8859-1 and the browser (correctly) interprets the two bytes as a pound sign. The problem here is that while everything looks correct it is needlessly using extra storage space and CPU cycles in the conversion.

It’s very simple to change the connection character set and avoid these overheads. The query “SET NAMES ‘utf8′” instructs MySQL to treat incoming data as UTF-8, which can be directly inserted into columns with a matching charset. In practice you may issue this query after initialising your connection to the MySQL server so all future communication will be in UTF-8.

One major problem occurs when you have a table full of double-encoded UTF-8 text because it was inserted before you knew about changing the connection character set. If you then add in the extra “SET NAMES” query and output the retrieved text to a browser you will notice all the extra characters have crept in.

You may be tempted to be selective about where you use SET NAMES ‘utf8′ however it is fairly simple to modify all of the data in place and end up with clean tables. Here is some pseudocode that pulls valid UTF-8 from the table and reinserts it after switching the connection charset:

SET NAMES ‘latin1′;
SELECT id, col1, col2, col3, col4 FROM table;
SET NAMES ‘utf8′;
for each row
INSERT INTO table (col1, col2, col3, col4) VALUES (, , , ) WHERE id = ;