Mysql multiple inserts support how many extended values? - mysql

We all know that it's better to use multiple inserts in ONE query than to run MULTIPLE queries. But, I don't know upto how many these multiple extended values does Mysql support? I searched over net but didn't find the correct answer. I'm just curious to know this.
Example,
INSERT INTO tbl_name VALUES(1, 'John Doe'), (2, 'Peter England'), ....
I remember when I was using some MVC framework where it was trying to fire hundreds/thousands of inserts in one query, I used to get some sort of error message like Mysql server has gone away.

The limit for multiple inserts, like the one you are talking about would be bound by the packet limit.
See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/packet-too-large.html
This will affect all query types, and not just insert.
To add a little more context, the error you spoke of MySQL server has gone away would be a result of exceeding the packet limit. A quote from the page:
You can also get these errors if you send a query to the server that
is incorrect or too large. If mysqld receives a packet that is too
large or out of order, it assumes that something has gone wrong with
the client and closes the connection. If you need big queries (for
example, if you are working with big BLOB columns), you can increase
the query limit by setting the server's max_allowed_packet variable,
which has a default value of 1MB. You may also need to increase the
maximum packet size on the client end. More information on setting the
packet size is given in Section C.5.2.10, “Packet too large”.

Your query's ultimate length limit is set by the max_allowed_packet setting - if you exceed that, the query gets truncated and almost certainly becomes invalid.
While doing a multi-value insert is more efficient, don't go overboard and try to do thousands of value sets. Try splitting it up so you're only doing a few hundred at most, and definitely make sure that the query string's length doesn't go near max_allowed_packet.

Related

How to prematurely finish mysql_use_result() / mysql_fetch_row()?

I am in the process of writing my first C client for MySQL 5.5 and have stumbled across the following page in the documentation. Nearly at the end, it states (bold emphasis mine, italic emphasis not mine):
An advantage of mysql_use_result() is [...]. Disadvantages are that
[...]. Furthermore, you must retrieve all the rows even if you
determine in mid-retrieval that you've found the information you were
looking for.
The last sentence is not clear to me.
1) What happens if I don't follow that line?
2) I think that there actually must be a way to prematurely end fetching rows if I decide that I have enough information (otherwise, this whole thing wouldn't make much sense in my eyes).
I understand that something bad could happen if I just stop fetching rows and then try to execute the next statement, but isn't there a function like mysql_finish_fetch() or something like that?
And what happens if I call mysql_free_result()? This should free the result even if I haven't fetched all rows yet, so it should be safe to call it in mid-retrieval and continue with whatever I'd like to do. Am I wrong here?
This sounds like an internal threading issue that MySQL exposes to the client. Chalk it up to the various MySQL gotchas. The short of it is that MySQL apparently has a finite number of "searchers" internally, and using mysql_use_result() apparently dedicates one of them to your API request. Further, MySQL apparently has no exposed API call to cancel such a request. The only option is to see the fetch through until the end.
The slightly longer version: internally, MySQL's cursors apparently have a single code path -- I imagine for performance in the common cases. That code path exits only when the cursor finds no more results. When you use the more common mysql_store_result(), MySQL has done this already before returning the result to the application. When you use mysql_use_result(), however, MySQL requires that you do "the dirty work" of iterating the rest of the result set so as to clear the cursor. Fun.
From the documentation:
mysql_use_result() initiates a result set retrieval but does not actually read the result set into the client like mysql_store_result() does. Instead, each row must be retrieved individually by making calls to mysql_fetch_row(). This reads the result of a query directly from the server without storing it in a temporary table or local buffer, which is somewhat faster and uses much less memory than mysql_store_result(). The client allocates memory only for the current row and a communication buffer that may grow up to max_allowed_packet bytes.
On the other hand, you should not use mysql_use_result() for locking reads if you are doing a lot of processing for each row on the client side, or if the output is sent to a screen on which the user may type a ^S (stop scroll). This ties up the server and prevent other threads from updating any tables from which the data is being fetched.
When using mysql_use_result(), you must execute mysql_fetch_row() until a NULL value is returned, otherwise, the unfetched rows are returned as part of the result set for your next query. The C API gives the error Commands out of sync; you can't run this command now if you forget to do this!
So, to actually answer your questions:
1) What happens if I don't follow that line?
The C API will return the error message: Commands out of sync; you can't run this command now
2) I think that there actually must be a way to prematurely end fetching rows if I decide that I have enough information (otherwise, this whole thing wouldn't make much sense in my eyes).
One would think, but no. You must iterate the result set completely.

Is there ANY way to retrieve the original input of an sql int field higher than 2147483647?

I have a big table, which saved data with an ID based on input from an external API. The ID is stored in an int field. When I developed the system, I encountered no problems, because the ID of records in the external API were always below 2147483647.
The system has been fetching data from the API for the last few months, and apparantly the ID crossed the 2147483647 mark. I now have a database with thousands of unusable records with ID 2147483647.
It is not possible to fetch this information from the database again (basically, the API allows us to look up data from max x days ago).
I am pretty sure that I am doomed. But might there be any backlog, or any other way, to retrieve the original input queries, or numbers that were truncated by MySQL to fit in the int field?
As already discussed in the comments, there is no way to retrieve the information from the table. It was silently(?!!!) truncated to 32 bits.
First, call the API provider, explain your situation, and see if you can redo the queries. Best that happens is they say yes and you don't have to try to reconstruct things from logs. Worst that happens is they say no and you're back where you are now.
Then there are some logs I would check.
First is the MySQL General Query Log. IF you had this turned on, it may contain the queries which were run. Another possibility is the Slow Query Log, more often enabled, if your queries happened to be slow.
In MySQL, data truncation is a warning by default. It's possible those warnings went into a log and included the original data. The MySQL Error Log is one possibility. On Windows it may have gone into the Windows Event Log. On a Mac, it might be in a log visible to the Console. In Unix, it might have gone to syslog.
Then it's possible the API queries themselves are logged somewhere. If you used a proxy it might contain them in its log. The program fetching from the API and adding to the database may also have its own logs. It's a long shot.
As a last resort, try grepping all of /var/log and /var/local/log and anywhere else you might think could contain a log.
In the future there are some things you can do to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. The most important is to turn on strict SQL mode. This will turn warnings, like that data has been truncated, into errors.
Set UNIQUE constraints on unique columns. Had your API ID column been declared UNIQUE the error would have been detected.
Use UNSIGNED BIGINT for numeric IDs. 2 billion is a number easily exceeded these days. It will mean 4 extra bytes per row or about 8 gigabytes extra to store 2 billion rows. Disk is cheap.
Consider turning on ANSI SQL mode. This will disable a lot of MySQL extensions and make your SQL more portable.
Finally, consider switching to PostgreSQL. Over the years MySQL has accumulated a lot of bad ideas, mish-mashes of functions, and bad default behaviors. You just got bit by one. PostgreSQL is far better designed, more powerful and flexible, and usually as fast or faster.
In Postgres, you would have gotten an error.
test=# CREATE TABLE foo ( id INTEGER );
CREATE TABLE
test=# INSERT INTO foo (id) VALUES (2147483648);
ERROR: integer out of range
If you have binary logging enabled, and you still have backups of the binlogs, and your binlog_format is not set to ROW then your original insert and/or update statements should be preserved there, where you could extract them and replay them into another server with a more appropriate table definition.
If you don't have the binlog enabled and/or you aren't archiving the binlogs in perpetuity... this is one of the reasons why you should consider doing it.

MySQL: How many UPDATES per second can an average box support?

We've got a constant stream of simple updates to a single MySQL table (storing user activity information). Let's say we group these into batch updates each second.
I want a ballpark idea of when mysql on a typical 4-core 8GB box will start having an issue keeping up with the updates coming in each second. E.g. how many rows of updates can I make # 1 per second?
This is a thought exercise to decide if I should get going with MySQL in the early days of our applications release (simplify development), or if MySQL's likely to bomb so soon as to make it not worth even venturing down that path.
The only way you can get a decent figure is through benchmarking your specific use case. There are just too many variables and there is no way around that.
It shouldn't take too long either if you just knock a bash script or a small demo app and hammer it with jmeter, then that can give you a good idea.
I used jmeter when trying to benchmark a similar use case. The difference was I was looking for write throughput for number of INSERTS. The most useful thing that came out when I was playing was the 'innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit' param. If you are using INNODB and don't need ACID compliance for your use case, then changing it to 0. This makes a huge difference to INSERT throughput and will likely do the same in your UPDATE use case. Although note that with this setting, changes only get flushed to disk once per second, so if your server gets a power cut or something, you could lose a seconds worth of data.
On my Quad Core 8GB Machine for my use case:
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 resulted in 80 INSERTS per second
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 resulted in 2000 INSERTS per second
These figures will probably bear no relevance to your use case - which is why you need to benchmark it yourself.
A lot of it depends on the quality of the code which you use to push to the DB.
If you write your batch to insert a single value per INSERT request (i.e.,
INSERT INTO table (field) VALUES (value_1);
INSERT INTO table (field) VALUES (value_2);
...
INSERT INTO table (field) VALUES (value_n);
, your performance will crash and burn.
If you insert multiple values using a single INSERT (i.e.
INSERT INTO table (field) values (value_1),(value_2)...(value_n);
, you'll find that you could easily insert many records per second
As an example, I wrote a quick app which needed to add the details of a request for an LDAP account to a holding DB. Inserting one field at a time (i.e., LDAP_field, LDAP_value), execution of the whole script took 10's of seconds. When I concatenated the values into a single INSERT request, execution time of the script went down to about 2 seconds from start to finish. This included the overhead of starting and committing a transaction
Hope this helps
Its not easy to give a general answer to this question. The numbers you ask for rely heavily not only on the hardware of your database server, MySQL itself, but also on server/client configuration, network and - equally important - on your database/table design too.
Generally speaking, with a naked MySQL setup on a state-of-the-art server and update statements using unique keys, I don't have issues below 200 update-statementsp er second if I fire them from localhost, at least that's what I get on my six year old winxp test enviroment. A naked installation on a new system will scale this way higher. If you think way bigger, one server isn't the way to go. MySQL can be tweaked and scaled out in some ways, therefore many companies rely heavily on it.
Just some basics:
If the fields you want to update have huge index files, the update
statements are alot slower since each statement has to write not only
data, but also index informations.
If your update statement cannot
use an index, it might take longer for the server to allocate the
required fields it has to update.
Slow memory and/or slow harddisks
might also slow down overall server performance.
Slow network
connection slows down communication between client and server.
There are whole books written about it, so I'll stop here and advise some further reading, if you're interested!

MySQL - Restrict (Forcibly) the number of rows returned for ANY QUERY

I have a special security need with mysql. I need to forcibly restrict the number of rows a query returns, issuing an error if the returned rows will be over, say a million rows. Here is the setup -
Need - The data has 100s of millions of rows, and we don't want the client to run down the server or do a complete extraction (They would never need all the lines, just aggregations) The idea is, if they need it, they run into an error or the barrier, and come to us with the reason explaining why they need to pull so many rows with a query.
System - Clients can use any query tool, so we have no control over what query is generated. Thus, we cannot use Limit x which seems to be the solution suggested everywhere.
I have tried searching for a solution, and for now it seems that the only way to do it is at the application level (which we do not own).
Is there any way to achieve this?
Setting
1- We need to have SSL enabled.
2- MySQL 5.5
Thanks!
J
It seems like you might be able to get close with MySQL Proxy.
https://launchpad.net/mysql-proxy
See this page for manipulating results. Not sure if it does a buffered or unbuffered read, or if you can cancel the reading of results or not...
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-proxy-scripting-read-query-result.html
It's open source, so you might be able to hire someone to tweak it if needed as well.
There may be other ways to restrict the overloading of your database server. Take a look at this link for more info:
MySQL - can I limit the maximum time allowed for a query to run?

MySQL - how many rows can I insert in one single INSERT statement?

Does it depend on the number of values sets? Does it depend on the number of bytes in the INSERT statement?
You can insert infinitely large number of records using INSERT ... SELECT pattern, provided you have those records, or part of, in other tables.
But if you are hard-coding the values using INSERT ... VALUES pattern, then there is a limit on how large/long your statement is: max_allowed_packet which limits the length of SQL statements sent by the client to the database server, and it affects any types of queries and not only for INSERT statement.
Ideally, Mysql allow infinite number of rows creation in single insert (at once) but when a
MySQL client or the mysqld server receives a packet bigger than max_allowed_packet bytes, it issues a Packet too large error and closes the connection.
To view what the default value is for max_allowed_packet variable, execute the following command in in MySQL:
show variables like 'max_allowed_packet';
Standard MySQL installation has a default value of 1048576 bytes (1MB). This can be increased by setting it to a higher value for a session or connection.
This sets the value to 500MB for everyone (that's what GLOBAL means):
SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet=524288000;
check your change in new terminal with new connection:
show variables like 'max_allowed_packet';
Now it should work without any error for infinite records insert. Thanks
Query is limited by max_allowed_packet in general.
You will hit the max_allowed_packet limit and
error: 1390 Prepared statement contains too many placeholders.
You can put 65535 placeholders in one sql.So if you have two columns in one row,you can insert 32767 rows in one sql.
Import of 50K+ Records in MySQL Gives General error: 1390 Prepared statement contains too many placeholders
refer to http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?20,161869, it's related with your mysql's configuration: max_allowed_packet, bulk_insert_buffer_size, key_buffer_size.
You can insert an infinite number of rows with one INSERT statement. For example, you could execute a stored procedure that has a loop executed a thousand times, each time running an INSERT query.
Or your INSERT could trip a trigger which itself performs an INSERT. Which trips another trigger. And so on.
No, it does not depend on the number of value sets. Nor does it depend on the number of bytes.
There is a limit to how deeply nested your parentheses may be, and a limit to how long your total statement is. Both of these are referenced, ironically, on thedailywtf.com . However, both of the means I mentioned above get around these limits.
I believe there's no defined number of rows you're limited to inserting per INSERT, but there may be some sort of maximum size for queries in general.
It is limited by max_allowed_packet.
You can specify by using:
mysqld --max_allowed_packet=32M
It is by default 16M.
You can also specify in my.cnf in /etc/mysql/