By now you must have read our documentation on isolation levels and also our Support for Transaction Isolation Levels. It is worth noting that the default transaction isolation level in MySQL 8 is REPEATABLE READ.

Here is a simple example of this, in action (you can test this on two different nodes, even across a 9-node Galera Cluster!).

First we do some simple setup:

CREATE DATABASE isolate;

USE isolate;

CREATE TABLE products (
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(50),
price DECIMAL(10, 2)
);

Then we insert some initial data:

INSERT INTO products (id, name, …

In this blog, I will provide answers to the Q & A for the “Introduction into storage engine troubleshooting” webinar.

First, I want to thank everybody for attending the July 14 webinar. The recording and slides for the webinar are available here. Below is the list of your questions that I wasn’t able to answer during the webinar, with responses:

Q: At which isolation level do 

pt-online-schema-change

 and 

pt-archive

  copy data from a table?

A: Both tools do not change the server’s default transaction isolation level. Use either

REPEATABLE READ

 or …

What is the difference between InnoDB locks and transaction isolation level? We’ll discuss it in this post.

Recently I received a question from a user about one of my earlier blog posts. Since it wasn’t sent as a comment, I will answer it here. The question:

> I am reading your article:
> https://www.percona.com/resources/technical-presentations/troubleshooting-locking-issues-percona-mysql-webinar

> Full table scan locks whole table.

> Some bad select (read) query can do full table scan on InnoDB, does it lock whole table please?

> My understanding was that SELECT (read) blocks another DML only in MyISAM.

To answer this question, we to need understand two different concepts: locking and …

I gots to know…

Big web companies who use MySQL – what isolation level(s) do you use? Do you take the default? Do you think about it at all? How about if you use, eg, memcached, what there? And, does your code think about optimistic or pessimistic locking?

I’ve been reading up on isolation levels after seeing Peter Bailis’
http://www.bailis.org/blog/understanding-weak-isolation-is-a-serious-problem/
(thanks to Mark Callaghan for re-tweeting about it).

I’m learning things…  here’s one for today –

I always thought that the “repeatable” in repeatable read applied to the data in general. Meaning that a query run twice in a transaction would “repeat” the same results. I guess it actually is supposed to apply to records?  Ie, other transactions’ updates to an …

While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not been covered well, and since there are still a large number of MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 installations that would upgrade or are in the process of upgrading to MySQL 5.5, I thought it necessary to discuss what these implications exactly are.

To read what Metadata Locking exactly is please read this section here in the MySQL manual.

Let’s start off with having a look at the Meta Data Locking behavior prior to MySQL 5.5.3

Metadata Locking behavior prior to MySQL 5.5.3

Prior to MySQL 5.5.3 a statement that opened a …

As an instructor with Percona I’m sometimes asked about the differences between the READ COMMITTED and REPEATABLE READ transaction isolation levels.  There are a few differences between READ-COMMITTED and REPEATABLE-READ, and they are all related to locking.

Extra locking (not gap locking)
It is important to remember that InnoDB actually locks index entries, not rows. During the execution of a statement InnoDB must lock every entry in the index that it traverses to find the rows it is modifying. It must do this to prevent deadlocks and maintain the isolation level.

If you run an UPDATE that is not well indexed you will lock many rows:

update employees set store_id = 0 where store_id = 1;
---TRANSACTION 1EAB04, ACTIVE 7 sec
633 lock struct(s), heap size 96696, 218786 row lock(s), undo log entries 1
MySQL thread id 4, OS thread handle 0x7f8dfc35d700, query id 47 localhost root …