September « 2016 « A Little Noise

September 20, 2016

Debugging Large Data with Rewriter

Filed under: MySQL — snoyes @ 7:43 pm

A customer showed that a particular client reported a less-than-helpful error message when it tried to display some meta-data about a table.

I couldn’t repeat the behavior with just a copy of the schema, so I suspected it was because of the size of data in the customer’s server – somebody had used an int where they needed a long.

The customer’s data was quite large – many hundreds of GB – more than I could easily whip up on my laptop to test. But, I didn’t really need all that data, or even any data at all; I just needed MySQL to pretend it had all that data. Specifically, I needed information_schema to report a large data_length.

Enter Rewriter, the query rewrite plugin that ships with MySQL 5.7 and later.

First, the general query log gave the exact query sent by the client:

select * FROM information_schema.partitions WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'schemaNameHere' AND TABLE_NAME = 'tableNameHere'

Create a copy of that table:

CREATE DATABASE debug_schema; CREATE TABLE debug_schema.partitions LIKE information_schema.partitions; INSERT INTO debug_schema.partitions SELECT * FROM information_schema.partitions;

Adjust the copy to report a different value:

UPDATE debug_schema.partitions SET data_length = POW(2, 32);

Install the Rewriter plugin, and add a rule to modify the schema name:

INSERT INTO query_rewrite.rewrite_rules(pattern, replacement) VALUES ( 'select * FROM information_schema.partitions WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = ? AND TABLE_NAME = ?', 'select * FROM debug_schema.partitions WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = ? AND TABLE_NAME = ?' );

CALL query_rewrite.flush_rewrite_rules();

Now when I try the client, it thinks information_schema has reported a huge data_length, and I get the same error which my customer had reported. Success!

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September 8, 2016

Aggregate JSON function in MySQL

Filed under: MySQL FAQ — snoyes @ 9:22 am

There is not yet an equivalent to GROUP_CONCAT that produces a JSON array. (There is in MySQL 8, but that’s not GA yet.) Until then, you can hack it together with string functions:

SELECT * FROM t;
+------+--------+
| id   | data   |
+------+--------+
|    1 | First  |
|    2 | Second |
+------+--------+

SELECT CONCAT('[', GROUP_CONCAT(JSON_OBJECT('id', id, 'value', data) SEPARATOR ', '), ']') AS j FROM t;
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| j                                                           |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| [{"id": 1, "value": "First"}, {"id": 2, "value": "Second"}] |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

Or you can use all JSON functions but hack the grouping:

SELECT j FROM (
       SELECT
         @c := @c + 1 AS c,
         @j := JSON_MERGE(@j, JSON_OBJECT('id', id, 'value', data)) AS j
       FROM t
       JOIN (SELECT @c := 0,  @j := JSON_ARRAY()) dt1
     ) dt2 ORDER BY c DESC LIMIT 1;
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| j                                                           |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| [{"id": 1, "value": "First"}, {"id": 2, "value": "Second"}] |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

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