Saturday, April 21, 2018

MySQL Document Store Document IDs.

Yesterday I was presenting on the MySQL Document Store and was asked if the _id fields created by the server as an InnoDB primary key is a UUID.  I knew that it was not a UUID but I had to hit the documentations (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/x-devapi-userguide/en/understanding-automatic-document-ids.html) to find out what the document ID really is -- a very interesting piece of information.

The Details

 If you are inserting a document lacking a _id key, the server generates a value. The _id is 32 bits of a unique prefix (4 bytes), a time stamp (8 bytes), and serial number (16 bytes). The prefix is assigned by the InnoDB Cluster to help ensure uniqueness across a cluster. The timestamp is the encoded startup time of the server.  The serial numbers uses the auto increment offset and auto increment increment server variables .  From the manual page:
This document ID format ensures that:
The primary key value monotonically increments for inserts originating from a single server instance, although the interval between values is not uniform within a table.
When using multi-primary Group Replication or InnoDB cluster, inserts to the same table from different instances do not have conflicting primary key values; assuming that the instances have the auto_increment_* system variables configured properly.

Properties

Once set, the _id can not be set to another value. Inserting your own value overrides the server assignment. And if you attempt to insert a document with the same _id you the server will generate a duplicate primary key error.

The _id values must be always increasing and sequential for optimal InnoDB performance. The server will keep track of theses numbers across restarts.

The generated _id values for each table/collection  are unique across instances to avoid primary key conflicts and minimize transaction certification in multi-primary Group Replication or InnoDB cluster environments.

Required?

So, you are adding a document to a collection and you get an ERROR: 5115!  That means in the following cast that the _id key/value pair is needed:

JS> db.foobar.add(
-> {
->  Data: "This is a test!"
-> }
-> )
->
ERROR: 5115: Document is missing a required field

JS> db.foobar.add( 
{  Data: "This is a test!" , 
-> _id: "first"
} 
)
Query OK, 1 item affected (0.0076 sec)