My SQL Interview Questions Answers

My SQL Interview Question - 76 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 76 : -

When a new threads connects to mysqld, mysqld will span a new thread to handle the request. This thread will first check if the hostname is in the hostname cache. If not the thread will call gethostbyaddr_r() and gethostbyname_r() to resolve the hostname.

If the operating system doesn't support the above thread-safe calls, the thread will lock a mutex and call gethostbyaddr() and gethostbyname() instead. Note that in this case no other thread can resolve other hostnames that is not in the hostname cache until the first thread is ready.

You can disable DNS host lookup by starting mysqld with --skip-name-resolve. In this case you can however only use IP names in the MySQL privilege tables.

If you have a very slow DNS and many hosts, you can get more performance by either disabling DNS lookop with --skip-name-resolve or by increasing the HOST_CACHE_SIZE define (default: 128) and recompile mysqld.

You can disable the hostname cache with --skip-host-cache. You can clear the hostname cache with FLUSH HOSTS or mysqladmin flush-hosts.

If you don't want to allow connections over TCP/IP, you can do this by starting mysqld with --skip-networking.

MySQL - Get Your Data as Small as Possible
One of the most basic optimization is to get your data (and indexes) to take as little space on the disk (and in memory) as possible. This can give huge improvements because disk reads are faster and normally less main memory will be used. Indexing also takes less resources if done on smaller columns.

MySQL supports a lot of different table types and row formats. Choosing the right table format may give you a big performance gain.

You can get better performance on a table and minimize storage space using the techniques listed below:

Use the most efficient (smallest) types possible. MySQL has many specialized types that save disk space and memory.
Use the smaller integer types if possible to get smaller tables. For example, MEDIUMINT is often better than INT.
Declare columns to be NOT NULL if possible. It makes everything faster and you save one bit per column. Note that if you really need NULL in your application you should definitely use

My SQL Interview Question - 77 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 77 : -

My SQL Interview Question - 78 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 78 : -

My SQL Interview Question - 79 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 79 : -

My SQL Interview Question - 80 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 80 : -

My SQL Interview Question - 81 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 81 : -

In most cases you should use GRANT to set up your users/passwords, so the following only applies for advanced users.
The examples in the preceding sections illustrate an important principle: when you store a non-empty password using INSERT or UPDATE statements, you must use the PASSWORD() function to encrypt it. This is because the user table stores passwords in encrypted form, not as plaintext. If you forget that fact, you are likely to attempt to set passwords like this:

shell> mysql -u root mysql
mysql> INSERT INTO user (Host,User,Password)
VALUES('%','jeffrey','biscuit');
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

The result is that the plaintext value 'biscuit' is stored as the password in the user table. When the user jeffrey attempts to connect to the server using this password, the mysql client encrypts it with PASSWORD() and sends the result to the server. The server compares the value in the user table (the encrypted value of 'biscuit') to the encrypted password (which is not 'biscuit'). The comparison fails and the server rejects the connection:

shell> mysql -u jeffrey -pbiscuit test
Access denied

Passwords must be encrypted when they are inserted in the user table, so the INSERT statement should have been specified like this instead:

mysql> INSERT INTO user (Host,User,Password)
VALUES('%','jeffrey',PASSWORD('biscuit'));

You must also use the PASSWORD() function when you use SET PASSWORD statements:

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR jeffrey@"%" = PASSWORD('biscuit');

If you set passwords using the GRANT ... IDENTIFIED BY statement or the mysqladmin password command, the PASSWORD() function is unnecessary. They both take care of encrypting the password for you, so you would specify a password of 'biscuit' like this:

mysql> GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO jeffrey@"%" IDENTIFIED BY 'biscuit';

or

shell> mysqladmin -u jeffrey password biscuit

NOTE: PASSWORD() does not perform password encryption in the same way that Unix passwords are encrypted. You should not assume that if your

My SQL Interview Question - 82 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 82 : -

MySQL replication is most beneficial for a system with frequent reads and not so frequent writes. In theory, by using a one master/many slaves setup you can scale by adding more slaves until you either run out of network bandwidth, or your update load grows to the point that the master cannot handle it.

In order to determine how many slaves you can get before the added benefits begin to level out, and how much you can improve performance of your site, you need to know your query patterns, and empirically (by benchmarking) determine the relationship between the throughput on reads (reads per second, or max_reads) and on writes max_writes) on a typical master and a typical slave. The example below will show you a rather simplified calculation of what you can get with replication for our imagined system.

Let's say our system load consists of 10% writes and 90% reads, and we have determined that max_reads = 1200 - 2 * max_writes, or in other words, our system can do 1200 reads per second with no writes, our average write is twice as slow as average read, and the relationship is linear. Let us suppose that our master and slave are of the same capacity, and we have N slaves and 1 master. Then we have for each server (master or slave):

reads = 1200 - 2 * writes (from bencmarks)

reads = 9* writes / (N + 1) (reads split, but writes go to all servers)

9*writes/(N+1) + 2 * writes = 1200

writes = 1200/(2 + 9/(N+1)

So if N = 0, which means we have no replication, our system can handle 1200/11, about 109 writes per second (which means we will have 9 times as many reads due to the nature of our application).

If N = 1, we can get up to 184 writes per second.

If N = 8, we get up to 400.

If N = 17, 480 writes.

Eventually as N approaches infinity (and our budget negative infinity), we can get very close to 600 writes per second, increasing system throughput about 5.5 times. However, with only 8 servers, we increased it almost 4 times already.

Note that our computations assumed infinite network bandwidth, and neglected several other factors that could tu

My SQL Interview Question - 83 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 83 : -

MySQL doesn't support views.

Some other SQL databases use `--' to start comments. MySQL has `#' as the start comment character, even if the mysql command-line tool removes all lines that start with `--'. You can also use the C comment style /* this is a comment */ with MySQL.

MySQL Version 3.23.3 and above supports the `--' comment style only if the comment is followed by a space. This is because this degenerate comment style has caused many problems with automatically generated SQL queries that have used something like the following code, where we automatically insert the value of the payment for !payment!:

UPDATE tbl_name SET credit=credit-!payment!

What do you think will happen when the value of payment is negative?

Because 1--1 is legal in SQL, we think it is terrible that `--' means start comment.

In MySQL Version 3.23 you can, however, use: 1-- This is a comment

The following discussion only concerns you if you are running a MySQL version earlier than Version 3.23:

If you have a SQL program in a text file that contains `--' comments you should use:

shell> replace " --" " #" < text-file-with-funny-comments.sql \
| mysql database

instead of the usual:

shell> mysql database < text-file-with-funny-comments.sql

You can also edit the command file ``in place'' to change the `--' comments to `#' comments:

shell> replace " --" " #" -- text-file-with-funny-comments.sql

Change them back with this command:

shell> replace " #" " --" -- text-file-with-funny-comments.sql

My SQL Interview Question - 84 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 84 : -

My SQL Interview Question - 85 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 85 : -

If you have followed the instructions, and your replication setup is not working, first elliminate the user error factor by checking the following:

Is the master logging to the binary log? Check with SHOW MASTER STATUS. If it is, Position will be non-zero. If not, verify that you have given the master log-bin option and have set server-id.
Is the slave running? Check with SHOW SLAVE STATUS. The answer is found in Slave_running column. If not, verify slave options and check the error log for messages.
If the slave is running, did it establish connection with the master? Do SHOW PROCESSLIST, find the thread with system user value in User column and none in the Host column, and check the State column. If it says connecting to master, verify the privileges for the replication user on the master, master host name, your DNS setup, whether the master is actually running, whether it is reachable from the slave, and if all that seems ok, read the error logs.
If the slave was running, but then stopped, look at SHOW SLAVE STATUS output andcheck the error logs. It usually happens when some query that succeeded on the master fails on the slave. This should never happen if you have taken a proper snapshot of the master, and never modify the data on the slave outside of the slave thread. If it does, it is a bug, read below on how to report it.
If a query on that succeeded on the master refuses to run on the slave, and a full database resync ( the proper thing to do ) does not seem feasible, try the following:
First see if there is some stray record in the way. Understand how it got there, then delete it and run SLAVE START If the above does not work or does not apply, try to understand if it would be safe to make the update manually ( if needed) and then ignore the next query from the master.
If you have decided you can skip the next query, do SET SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=1; SLAVE START; to skip a query that does not use auto_increment, last_insert_id or timestamp, or SET SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER=2; SLAVE START; otherwise If you are sure the slave started out perfectly in sync with the master, and no one has updated the tables involved outside of slave thread, report the bug, so you will not have to do the above tricks again.
Make sure you are not running into an old bug by upgrading to the most recent version.
If all else fails, read the error logs. If they are bi

My SQL Interview Question - 86 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 86 : -

You can find a discussion about different locking methods in the appendix.

All locking in MySQL is deadlock-free. This is managed by always requesting all needed locks at once at the beginning of a query and always locking the tables in the same order.

The locking method MySQL uses for WRITE locks works as follows:

If there are no locks on the table, put a write lock on it. Otherwise, put the lock request in the write lock queue. The locking method MySQL uses for READ locks works as follows:

If there are no write locks on the table, put a read lock on it. Otherwise, put the lock request in the read lock queue. When a lock is released, the lock is made available to the threads in the write lock queue, then to the threads in the read lock queue.

This means that if you have many updates on a table, SELECT statements will wait until there are no more updates.

To work around this for the case where you want to do many INSERT and SELECT operations on a table, you can insert rows in a temporary table and update the real table with the records from the temporary table once in a while.

This can be done with the following code:

mysql> LOCK TABLES real_table WRITE, insert_table WRITE;
mysql> insert into real_table select * from insert_table;
mysql> TRUNCATE TABLE insert_table;
mysql> UNLOCK TABLES;

You can use the LOW_PRIORITY options with INSERT if you want to prioritize retrieval in some specific cases.

You could also change the locking code in `mysys/thr_lock.c' to use a single queue. In this case, write locks and read locks would have the same priority, which might help some applications.

MySQL - Table Locking Issues
The table locking code in MySQL is deadlock free.

MySQL uses table locking (instead of row locking or column locking) on all table types, except BDB tables, to achieve a very high lock speed. For large tables, table locking is MUCH better than row locking for most applications, but there are, of course, some pitfalls.

For BDB tables, MySQL only uses ta

My SQL Interview Question - 87 : -

My SQL Interview Answer - 87 : -