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primary key

Learning from the Bugs Database

This week I came across an old known issue reported in May 2010: Master/Slave Replication with binlog_format = ROW and tables without a Primary Key is a bad idea! Especially if these tables are huge.

Why this is a bad idea is described in the bug report #53375:

How the Lack of a Primary Key May Effectively Stop the Slave

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Most (relational) DBAs and DB application developers know the concept of a primary key ("PK") and what it is good for. However, much too often one still encounters table definitions without a PK. True, the relational theory based on sets does not need a PK, and all operations (insert, select, update, delete) can also be done on tables for which no PK was defined. If performance doesn't matter (or the data volume is small, a typical situation in tests), the lack of a PK does not immediately cause negative consequences.

Deadlocks, indexing and Primary Key's

Recently a customer has shown up with some deadlocks occurring frequently. They were of the following type (I have shortened the output a bit):

Canias optimizations

Canias is a great ERP product but there is still some potential to improve it. We only focus on MyISAM/InnoDB installations of Canias v6.0.2 in this article. For other DB back-ends those recommendations might be obsolete.

A general problem is, that in InnoDB Primary Keys are crucial in MySQL. Canias often lacks a Primary Key. In this case InnoDB will use the Unique Key for the Primary Key.

In InnoDB data are sorted by the Primary Key so it is a good idea to have the Primary Key on CLIENT and COMPANY as well to get proper sorting of the rows.

Undefined

Disadvantages of explicitly NOT using InnoDB Primary Keys?

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We recently had the case with one of our customers where we got externally generated random hash values (up to 70 bytes) and they were used as Primary Keys in InnoDB.

As we know, this is not a very good idea because the size of all secondary indexes becomes large and because a random hash value as a Primary Key gives us a bad locality of our rows in the table 1.

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