Re: Is there a solution to this?

[Robert Freeland]

Not to bash MySQL -- because it really is a nice database for being FREE -- but this is the kind of thing that puts MySQL in a bad light relative to "real" databases like Oracle or even SQL Server.

If I issue a query against a database, it should either (a) do the work and give me the answer, or (b) throw an error. It should NOT hang indefinitely under ANY circumstances. Nor should it take DAYS to finish a relatively simple query. The fact that this thread was created THREE YEARS AGO is pretty damning. This should be fixed by now.

Just to forestall any comments to the affect, "Well, if you just turn this dial so, and then set this switch however, then it won't hang," the database shouldn't hang regardless of how badly I maul my setup parameters. Do you think I ever have to worry about this kind of thing with SQL Server? Never.

For those of you looking for some hint as to what's going on, here's a little bit of help:

(1) SHOW PROCESSLIST will tell you at a very high level what the process is actually doing. But if you've found this thread, you know that already.

(2) On Windows Server, the temporary table is being written to the C:\Windows\Temp folder, with a name like "#sql_*.MYD". If you're patient, you can watch just how S-L-O-W-L-Y MySQL writes this table. I have no idea what kind of algorithm could possibly take this long.

For instance, I have a query that's been running for 3 hours and has only managed to write 45MB to the temporary table (and no indexes yet). I can copy the entire temporary table in 15 seconds, so the process definitely isn't I/O bound. The process is using almost ZERO CPU, so it's definitely not CPU bound. I guess the process must be memory bound, but MySQL is using a GIG of RAM, so it could have built that entire result table in memory without any problem. The performance really is pretty sad.

In the realm of workarounds, we've had decent success breaking the job into smaller pieces and then running them all sequentially. Of course, you have no way of knowing when you'll need to do this until you've tried the full query first and seen it hang. Sad, sad, sad.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/14/2008 12:35AM by Robert Freeland.