Increase every varchar field length by factor of 5 - mysql

I failed to account for something in my data, and I would like to MySQL increase every varchar field length in one table by factor of 5. Is there an easy way to do this?

"Easy" depend on how many tables and columns you have to modify, but you could select the relevant table_name, column_name, and character_maximum_length values from information_schema.columns into a new table, multiply the length values by 5, and concatenate the values into ALTER TABLE statements. Then you will need to execute that set of generated statements.
If there are primary and foreign keys using these columns, you will have to drop them first and recreate them afterward.

Related

MySql Indexing part of a column

I need to search a medium sized MySql table (about 15 million records).
My query searches for a value ending with another value, for example:
SELECT * FROM {tableName} WHERE {column} LIKE '%{value}'
{value} is always 7 characters length.
{column} is sometimes 8 characters length (otherwise it is 7).
Is there a way to improve performence on my search?
clearly index is not an option.
I could save {column} values in reverse order on another column and index that column, but im looking to avoid this solution.
{value} is always 7 characters length
Your data is not mormalized. Fixing this is the way to fix the problem. Anything else is a hack. Having said that I accept it is not always proactical to repair damage done in the past by dummies.
However the most appropriate hack depends on a whole lot of information you've not told us about.
how frequently you will run the query
what the format of the composite data is
but im looking to avoid this solution.
Why? It's a reasonable way to address the problem. The only downside is that you need to maintain the new attribute - given that this data domain appears in different attributes in multiple (another normalization violation) means it would make more sense to implement the index in a seperate, EAV relation but you just need to add triggers on the original table to maintain sync using your existing code base. Every solution I can think will likely require a similar fix.
Here's a simplified example (no multiple attributes) to get you started:
CREATE TABLE lookup (
table_name VARCHAR(18) NOT NULL,
record_id INT NOT NULL, /* or whatever */
suffix VARCHAR(7),
PRIMARY KEY (table_name, record_id),
INDEX (suffix, table_name, record_id)
);
CREATE TRIGGER insert_suffix AFTER INSERT ON yourtable
FOR EACH ROW
REPLACE INTO lookup (table_name, record_id, suffix)
VALUES ('yourtable', NEW.id
, SUBSTR(NEW.attribute, NEW.id, RIGHT(NEW.attribute, 7
);
CREATE TRIGGER insert_suffix AFTER UPDATE ON yourtable
FOR EACH ROW
REPLACE INTO lookup (table_name, record_id, suffix)
VALUES ('yourtable', NEW.id
, RIGHT(NEW.attribute, 7)
);
CREATE TRIGGER insert_suffix AFTER DELETE ON yourtable
FOR EACH ROW
DELETE FROM lookup WHERE table_name='yourtable' AND record_id=OLD.id
;
If you have a set number of options for the first character, then you can use in. For instance:
where column in ('{value}', '0{value}', '1{value}', . . . )
This allows MySQL to use an index on the column.
Unfortunately, with a wildcard at the beginning of the pattern, it is hard to use an index. Is it possible to store the first character in another column?

MySQL: Get Row Size by Column

I tried to alter one column in an existing table, from Varchar(5000) to Varchar(10000) using SQLyog.
This resulted in an error:
Row size too large. The maximum row size for the used table type, not
counting BLOBs, is 65535. This includes storage overhead, check the
manual. You have to change some columns to TEXT or BLOBs.
I understand from this forum that I need to change this large Varchar field to Text - which I assume is stored 'outside' of the table in Innodb - but I would be interested in seeing a list of all columns for the table and the size they use.
Can anyone suggest a query etc, that could do this?
Look into information_schema.COLUMNS table, it has lot of such details.
This is query for getting varchar columns and their length for any table-
SELECT COLUMN_NAME, CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH
FROM information_schema.COLUMNS AS ins
WHERE ins.TABLE_NAME = '<your table name>' AND ins.DATA_TYPE = 'varchar'
To see a list of all columns for the table and the size they use, you can run:
describe my_table;
Or to see the create table statement:
show create table my_table;

How can I modify an existing column's data type?

One of the columns in a somewhat large table (~10,000 records) is of the data type DECIMAL(10,0). I'm using MySQL.
I'd like the values to be displayed to 2 decimal places, so I need to alter this to DECIMAL(10,2), without screwing up the table's existing records. How could this be done?
Which DBMS are you using ? you can try like this for MySQL :
alter table tblName modify columnName newDataType;

MySQL indexes: how do they work?

I'm a complete newbie with MySQL indexes. I have several MyISAM tables on MySQL 5.0x having utf8 charsets and collations with 100k+ records each. The primary keys are generally integer. Many columns on each table may have duplicate values.
I need to quickly count, sum, average, or otherwise perform custom calculations on any number of fields in each table or joined on any number of others.
I found this page giving an overview of MySQL index usage: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-indexes.html, but I'm still not sure I'm using indexes right. Just when I think I've made the perfect index out of a collection of fields I want to calculate against, I get the "index must be under 1000 bytes" error.
Can anyone explain how to most efficiently create and use indexes to speed up queries?
Caveat: upgrading Mysql is not possible in this case. Using Navicat Light for db administration, but this app isn't required.
When you create an index on a column or columns in MySQL table, the database is creating a data structure called a B-tree (assuming you use the default index setting), for which the key of each record is a concatenation of the values in the indexed columns.
For example, let's say you have a table that is defined like:
CREATE TABLE mytable (
id int unsigned auto_increment,
column_a char(32) not null default '',
column_b int unsigned not null default 0,
column_c varchar(512),
column_d varchar(512),
PRIMARY KEY (id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;
Then let's give it some data:
INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (1, 'hello', 2, null, null);
INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (2, 'hello', 3, 'hi', 'there');
INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (3, 'how', 4, 'are', 'you?');
INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (4, 'foo', 5, '', 'bar');
Now suppose you decide to add a key to column_a and column_b like:
ALTER TABLE mytable ADD KEY (column_a, column_b);
The database is going to create the aforementioned B-tree, which will have four keys in it, one for each row:
hello-2
hello-3
how-4
foo-5
When you perform a search that references the column_a column, or that references the column_a AND column_b columns, the database will be able to use this index to narrow the record set it has to examine. Let's say you have a query like:
SELECT ... FROM mytable WHERE column_a = 'hello';
Even though the above query does not specify a value for the column_b column, it can still take advantage of our index by looking for all keys that begin with "hello". For the same reason, if you had a query like:
SELECT ... FROM mytable WHERE column_b = '2';
This query would NOT be able to use our index, because it would have to parse the index keys themselves to try to determine which keys' second value matches '2', which is terribly inefficient.
Now, let's address your original question of the maximum length. Suppose we try to create an index spanning all four non-PK columns in this table:
ALTER TABLE mytable ADD KEY (column_a, column_b, column_c, column_d);
You will get an error:
ERROR 1071 (42000): Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes
In this case our column lengths are 32, 10, 512, and 512, which in a single-byte-per-character situation is 1066, which is above the limit of 1000. Suppose that it DID work; you would be creating the following keys:
hello-2-
hello-3-hi-there
how-4-are-you?
foo-5--bar
Now, suppose that you had values in column_c and column_d that were very long -- 512 characters each. Even in a basic single-byte character set, your keys would now be over 1000 bytes in length, which is what MySQL is complaining about. It gets even worse with multibyte character sets, where seemingly "small" columns can still push the keys over the limit.
If you MUST use a large compound key, one solution is to use InnoDB tables rather than the default MyISAM tables, which support a larger key length (3500 bytes) -- you can do this by swapping ENGINE=InnoDB instead of ENGINE=MyISAM in the declaration above. However, generally speaking, if you are using long keys there is probably something wrong with your table design.
Remember that single-column indexes often provide more utility than multi-column indexes. You want to use a multi-column index when you are going to often/always take advantage of it by specifying all of the necessary criteria in your queries. Also, as others have mentioned, do NOT index every column of a table, since each index is adding storage overhead to your database. You want to limit your indexes to the columns that are frequently used by queries, and if it seems like you need too many, you should probably think about breaking up your tables up into more logical components.
Indexes generally aren't well suited for custom calculations where the user is able to construct their own queries. Typically you choose the indexes to match the specific queries you intend to run, using EXPLAIN to see if the index is being used.
In the case that you have absolutely no idea what queries might be performed it is generally best to create one index per column - and not one index covering all columns.
If you have a good idea of what queries might be run often you could create an extra index for those specific queries. You can also add indexes later if your users complain that certain types of queries run too slow.
Also, indexes generally aren't that useful for calculating counts, sums and averages since these types of calculations require looking at every row.
It sounds like you are trying to put too many fields into your index. The limit is the probably the number of bytes it takes to encode all the fields.
The index is used in looking up the records, so you want to choose the fields which you are "WHERE"ing on. In choosing between those fields, you want to choose the ones that will narrow the results the quickest.
As an example, a filter on Male/Female will usually not help much because you are only going to save about 50% of the time. However, a filter on State may be useful because you'll break down into many more categories. However, if almost everybody in the database is in a single state then that won't work.
Remember that indexes are for sorting and finding rows.
The error message you got sounds like it is talking about the 1000 byte Prefix Limit for MyISAM table indexes. From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-index.html:
The statement shown here creates an
index using the first 10 characters of
the name column:
CREATE INDEX part_of_name ON customer
(name(10)); If names in the column
usually differ in the first 10
characters, this index should not be
much slower than an index created from
the entire name column. Also, using
column prefixes for indexes can make
the index file much smaller, which
could save a lot of disk space and
might also speed up INSERT operations.
Prefix support and lengths of prefixes
(where supported) are storage engine
dependent. For example, a prefix can
be up to 1000 bytes long for MyISAM
tables, and 767 bytes for InnoDB
tables.
Maybe you can try a FULLTEXT index for problematic columns.

When you alter a table how do you detect the data type of columns?

I am running MySQL and I need to change the data type of certain columns from an enumeration to integer. However, there are a lot of columns. (If this exists) What is the syntax to alter all columns at the same time that are enumerations. Here is how I am updating a single column to make it integer data type:
ALTER TABLE table_name CHANGE column_name column_name INTEGER;
SHOW COLUMNS FROM WHERE TYPE LIKE "%enum%"
you could afterwards iterate through your result similar to the solution described here:
http://se2.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-fetch-field.php#92069
hope this helps,
Michael