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Long running transactions can be problematic for OLTP workloads, particularly where we would expect most to be completed in less than a second. In some cases a transaction staying open just a few seconds can cause behaviour that is entirely unexpected, with the developers at a loss as to why a transaction remained open. There are a number of ways to find long running transactions, luckily versions of MySQL from 5.6 onwards provide some very insightful instrumentation.

In the article about the role of a primary key, I mentioned that a secondary index in an InnoDB table consists not only of the values of its member columns, but also values of the table's primary key are concatenated to the index. I.e. the primary key contents is part of every other index.

In (My)SQL, join is a means for combining records from two tables into a single set which can be either returned as is or used in another join. In order to perform the operation a join has to define the relationship between records in either table, as well as the way it will evaluate the relationship. The relationship itself is created through a set of conditions that are part of the join and usually are put inside ON clause. The rest is determined through a join type, which can either be an inner join or an outer join.

Often I see a SQL problem solved incorrectly and I do not mean inefficiently. Simply incorrectly. In many cases the developer remains unaware that they aren't getting the results they were expecting or even if a result is correct, it is only by chance, for example because the database engine was smart enough to figure out some non-sense in a query. In a few posts I will try to disclose some of the more common problems.

Have you ever tried to kill a query, but rather than just go away, it remained among the running ones for an extended period of time? Or perhaps you have noticed some threads makred with killed showing up from time to time and not actually dying. What are these zombies? Why does MySQL sometimes seem to fail to terminate queries quickly? Is there any way to force the kill command to actually work instantaneously? This article sheds some light on it.