There are a number of options for generating ID values for your tables. In this post, Alexey Mikotkin of Devart explores your choices for generating identifiers with a look at auto_increment, triggers, UUID and sequences.

AUTO_INCREMENT

Frequently, we happen to need to fill tables with unique identifiers. Naturally, the first example of such identifiers is PRIMARY KEY data. These are usually integer values hidden from the user since their specific values are unimportant.

When adding a row to a table, you need to take this new key value from somewhere. You can set up your own process of generating a new identifier, but MySQL comes to the aid of the user with the AUTO_INCREMENT column setting. It is set as a column attribute and allows you to generate unique integer identifiers. As an example, consider the …

I have been talking with a group of folks who have been making a product that has lots of free functionality, including the ability to centrally manage many MySQL instances. The administration functions include starting and stopping MySQL, seeing status and system variables, seeing and managing the MySQL config file (/etc/my.cnf), seeing and managing accounts, a small dashboard of overall health graphs, and more.

With this free tool you can look at and manage local and remote databases. It supports ssh tunneling, including ssh using password-protected ssh keys. It’s pretty neat, and I have been working with the product manager to add features. I think this took will become the de facto standard for centralized GUI administration of MySQL.

The tool is
MySQL workbench….Surprise! One of the best new features for the administrator is that you can now create an administration connection for an existing workbench connection …

The easiest way to see the differences between two schemas on a non-Windows machine is to run:

mysqldump -h server1 --no-data --all-databases > file1.sql
mysqldump -h server2 --no-data --all-databases > file2.sql
diff file1.sql file2.sql

However, this will show also trivial differences, such as the value of AUTO_INCREMENT. It also does not give you a way to patch one schema to be like another.

We frequently are asked to “do a schema diff and create a script that will ‘patch’ one server.” Usually this is done to take a development or test schema and move it to production for a release.

We like to use the best tool for the job, and while diff is good, I like to use MySQL workbench. The OSS (Community) edition provides all the functionality we need for creating a schema diff and …

So, you want to compile Workbench for Linux, on Fedora 9. You need to install the following packages:

autoconf automake libtool libzip-devel libxml2-devel libsigc++20-devel libglade2-devel gtkmm24-devel mesa-libGLU-devel mysql-libs mysql mysql-devel uuid-devel lua-devel glitz-devel glitz-glx-devel pixman-devel pcre-devel libgnome-devel gtk+-devel pango-devel cairo

I feel I’m being too liberal with dependencies, but I’m not about to strip it, I just want to get it working first :)

You need to have ctemplate and ctemplate-devel installed from updates-testing-newkey (relevant koji build log).

By default, configure.in in Workbench looks for “google-ctemplate”, as opposed to just “ctemplate” as Fedora calls it. You can fix this (easy), or “cheat” - in /usr/local/include you can do sudo ln -s …

I had the pleasure of sitting right across the MySQL GUI Tools Team, and decided to try my hand at Workbench (Workbench for Linux, that is). Congratulations to the entire team for the great work! I am excited.

First up, the things you need on Ubuntu 8.04 (I created a fresh install, and installed all the updates), if you’re downloading the binary:

• liblua5.1-0
• libglitz1
• libzip1
• libmysqlclient15off
• mysql-common
• libglitz-glx1

Workbench on Linux

It works. It starts up. Its exciting. Of course, when I try to edit a table name or even create a table, it fails by segmentation fault. Segfaults are annoying… so the best way to debug it, is of course to run catchsegv. …