4 May 2012 • 1 minute read It’s really easy to set up automatic MySQL backups using mysqldump
. First, you need to set up a user with SELECT
and LOCK TABLES
privileges. In this example the user doesn’t have a password.
CREATE USER 'autobackup'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT, LOCK TABLES ON *.* TO 'autobackup'@'localhost';
Next create the cron job with crontab -e
. This job is set to run every day at 5:20am.
20 5 * * * mysqldump --user=autobackup dbname | gzip -c > /var/backups/dbname-$(date +\%Y\%m\%d).sql.gz
Don’t forget to change dbname
to the name of the database that you want to backup. And that’s it - you’re done! This cron job will create a backup of your database and save it to /var/backups
with a filename based on the current date, e.g. /var/backups/dbname-20120503.sql.gz
(Read more) 1 Apr 2012 • 1 minute read MySQL has a prefix limitation of 767 bytes in InnoDB, and 1000 bytes in MYISAM. This has never been a problem for me, until I started using UTF-16 as the character set for one of my databases. UTF-16 can use up to 4 bytes per character which means that in an InnoDB table, you can’t have any keys longer than 191 characters. Take this CREATE
statement for example:
CREATE TABLE `user` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`username` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
`password` varchar(64) NOT NULL,
`email` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
UNIQUE KEY `UNIQ_8D93D649F85E0677` (`username`),
UNIQUE KEY `UNIQ_8D93D649E7927C74` (`email`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf16 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;
This will fail with an error like Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes
, because the UNIQUE INDEX
on the email field requires at least 1020 bytes (255 * 4).
Unfortunately there is no real solution to this. Your only options are to either reduce the size of the column, use a different character set (like UTF-8), or use a different engine (like MYISAM). In this case I switched the character set to UTF-8 which raised the maximum key length to 255 characters.
(Read more)