Book Image

MySQL Admin Cookbook

By : Daniel Schneller, Udo Schwedt
Book Image

MySQL Admin Cookbook

By: Daniel Schneller, Udo Schwedt

Overview of this book

<p>MySQL is the most popular open-source database and is also known for its easy set up feature. However, proper configuration beyond the default settings still is a challenge, along with some other day-to-day maintenance tasks such as backing up and restoring, performance tuning, and server monitoring. These tasks have not been covered thoroughly in the default documentation.<br /><br />This book provides both step-by-step recipes and relevant background information on these topics and more. It covers everything from basic to advanced aspects of MySQL administration and configuration. One of the things you are really going to love about this book is that all recipes are based on real-world experience and were derived from proven solutions used in an enterprise environment.<br /><br />This book shows you everything you need to know about MySQL Administration. You will learn to set up MySQL replication to manage load balancing and deal with online backup and fail-over scenarios. As you consider the benefits of backing up, you might like to back up your database efficiently with advanced techniques covered in this book.<br /><br />The book demonstrates how to create, modify, and delete indexes. You will also learn to identify duplicate indexes, which hinder your MySQL server performance. This book focuses on administration tasks and will help you as an administrator to optimize the database for efficiency and reliability.<br /><br />You will learn to manage data efficiently by inserting data in existing database content and importing and exporting databases. The sooner you learn about taking advantage of metadata from this book, the sooner you can start using the space efficiently. Get to know about managing users and assigning privileges and regaining lost administrative user credentials. Finally, learn to manage the database schema by customizing it to automate database schema evolution in the context of application updates.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
MySQL Admin Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Adding new columns at specific positions


One of the regular tasks a database administrator has to perform is to modify the structure of existing tables, especially adding new columns to accommodate the need to store more attributes for the records stored in a table.

While in general the order of columns is not relevant for MySQL itself—or any well-behaved application accessing columns by name rather than their position in the table—it is often desirable to have control over the order the columns appear in a table.

There are several reasons to precisely control the column order: from a general drive to keep your schema tidy, over the general benefit of a table displaying its columns in a sensible order when doing a SELECT *, to other external constraints that you cannot influence.

In this recipe, we will show you how to modify an existing table and add one or more new columns at specific positions.

Getting ready

To follow along, you will need access to MySQL server with a user account that has...