Tmpdir

Today a customer gave me the idea of using a separate file as a volume for limiting the MySQL tmpdir size. On some not so well set-up Linux systems the MySQL tmpdir is located under /tmp which is the same mount point as / (root). This can lead to troubles in case the tmpdir is filled up with implicit temporary MyISAM tables which fills up the / (root) directory of the O/S as well.

MySQL itself has no possibility to limit explicitly the total size nor the number of implicit temporary tables. So this can …

MySQL temporary tables are created either in memory (as MEMORY tables) or on disk (as MyISAM tables). How many tables went to disk and how many tables went to memory you can find with:

mysql> SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Created_tmp%tables';
+-------------------------+----------+
| Variable_name           | Value    |
+-------------------------+----------+
| Created_tmp_disk_tables | 49094    |
| Created_tmp_tables      | 37842181 |
+-------------------------+----------+

Tables created in memory are …