Posts by Augusto Bott

Sometimes a client asks us to change the datatype of a column, but forgets to mention the schema name, and sometimes even the table name. As you can imagine, having this kind of information is vital to locate the object and perform the requested action. This kind of behaviour must be related to Murphy’s Law. In any case, I’d like to share with you a simple stored procedure that has helped us a lot in the past.

The other day, a client mentioned they were getting strange results when running ALTER TABLE. The episode involved modifying an existing primary key to add an auto_increment primary key: it was “shifting” values. Say what?! As it turns out, it was a very special value getting changed: zero. Some fiddling revealed the underlying reason. Care to join me? To understand what’s going on, follow the example below as we start with an empty database, create a table and insert a few rows

The other day we began to encounter weird and random errors on small and innocent queries that shouldn’t give any errors at all. It all lead to one of our most basic health checks failing for no apparent reason. The first clue that popped into our minds was related to case-sensitivity, since the failing check was looking for the column names of the only table in the schema with UPPER CASE name. This symptom was especially weird since all of this was happening on MySQL setups running on Windows, and so we’re not sure if this was being caused by some internal code library, MySQL, or Windows itself. Here’s how to fix it.

So you want to store URLs in MySQL, and the URLs have those annoying %20%27%7C%26%5E%2B%2D%25 symbols? And you want to be able to show your users some kind of human-readable information. You might want to consider using this trick. Take this list of commonly escaped characters as an example…