A key is typically defined as a column or a group of columns that are used to uniquely locate table records in relational databases (including MySQL, of course). And now that we've covered MySQL primary keys on our blog, it's time to give you a similarly handy guide on foreign keys.

The post How to Add, Show, and Drop MySQL Foreign Keys appeared first on Devart Blog.

During the early stages of my career, I was captivated by the theories and concepts surrounding foreign keys and how they empowered us to maintain data integrity. However, in practical application, I have found them to be quite challenging to manage. I am sure you’re a champion DBA, but I keep my distance from foreign keys.

With that short story as a background, this post aims to address the dilemma that arises when utilizing the pt-online-schema-change tool on tables that contain foreign keys.

We already know what one of the most used Percona tools pt-online-schema-change is and how pt-online-schema-change handles foreign keys.

When utilizing the pt-online-schema-change tool to alter a table, such as …

Do you wonder if MySQL tells you the truth about writes to tables that have foreign key constraints? The situation is complex, and getting visibility on what is really happening can be a problem.

I found this issue intriguing and decided to share and highlight some examples.

Query Plan

Let us take this example table:

CREATE TABLE `product` (
  `category` int NOT NULL,
  `id` int NOT NULL,
  `price` decimal(10,0) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`category`,`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

We want to know how costly an example UPDATE against this table will be:

mysql > EXPLAIN update product set id=id+1 where id=65032158 and category=3741760\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: UPDATE
        table: product
   partitions: NULL
         type: range
possible_keys: PRIMARY
          key: PRIMARY
      key_len: 8
          ref: const,const
         rows: 1 …

In this blog post, we’ll look at how to get rid of the unused Foreign Key (FK) constraint and/or related columns/keys with the help of pt-online-schema-change and the power of its plugins.

Before we proceed, here is a useful blog post written by Peter Zaitsev on Hijacking Innodb Foreign Keys.

If you are trying to get rid of an unused foreign key (FK) constraint and related columns from versions older than MySQL 5.6, or tables that cannot be executed with

ALTER TABLE ... ALGORITHM=INPLACE

 because of limitations mentioned here (specifically, …

So I ran across a situation today dealing with having to update a field but the user was unable to do so because of the related foreign key constraints.

This blog post with be a simple example showing a foreign key and how to update them if you have to do so.

First let us create a simple table and populate it with random data.

CREATE TABLE `table_w_code` (
`SOMECode` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`NameofCode` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`SOMECode`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB ;


Now we will need another table that has a foreign key tied to our previous table.

[anothermysqldba]> CREATE TABLE `table_with_fk` (
`SOMEID` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`SOMECode` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`Somemorefields` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci …

Schema alteration is a big headache especially when it has already reached to production and things get worse when the relations are involved.Below is a short example for altering tables…

The post MySQL – Alter table-change datatype of column with foreign key first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

The other day, I was troubleshooting a deadlock, and I wondered if any of the table’s columns were referenced by any foreign keys (fks) from any other tables in the instance.

Well, this is actually very simple with information_schema (I_S):

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE
WHERE REFERENCED_TABLE_NAME='parent';

Where `parent` is the name of the table you’re searching for.

Note this query does not restrict on the database, or schema, name, but that could easily be added (or any other number of conditions). Here is an example where I only return the most useful columns (which could be useful for determining said conditions):

SELECT CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA, CONSTRAINT_NAME, TABLE_SCHEMA,
        TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, REFERENCED_TABLE_SCHEMA,
        REFERENCED_TABLE_NAME, REFERENCED_COLUMN_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE
WHERE REFERENCED_TABLE_NAME='parent';

If there …

One common cause for deadlocks when using InnoDB tables is from the existence of foreign key constraints and the shared locks (S-lock) they acquire on referenced rows.

The reason I want to discuss them though is because they are often a bit tricky to diagnose, especially if you are only looking at the SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS output (which might be a bit counter-intuitive since one would expect it to contain this info).

Let me show a deadlock error to illustrate (below is from SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS\g):

------------------------
LATEST DETECTED DEADLOCK
------------------------
111109 20:10:03
*** (1) TRANSACTION:
TRANSACTION 65839, ACTIVE 19 sec, OS thread id 4264 starting index read
mysql tables in use 1, locked 1
LOCK WAIT 6 lock struct(s), heap size 1024, 3 row lock(s), undo log entries 1
MySQL thread id 3, query id 74 localhost 127.0.0.1 root Updating
UPDATE parent SET age=age+1 WHERE id=1
*** (1) WAITING FOR THIS LOCK TO BE …