(What I should keep in mind in case of disaster)

Retrieve and maintain in SQL format the tables definition of all tables in a database, is one of the best practices that we all should adopt.

To have that under versioning is also another BP to keep in mind.
Doing that may seems redundant, but it become a life saver in several situations.
From the need to review what had historically change in that table, know who change what and why, to when you need to recover your data and have your loved MySQL instance not able to start.

But let us be honest, just few do the right thing, and even fewer keep that information up to date. Given that, what can we do when we have the need to discover/recover the table structure? From the beginning, MySQL had used some external files to describe the internal structure. For instance, if I have a schema named windmills and a table named wmillAUTOINC1, on file system I will see:

-rw-r-----. 1 mysql mysql     8838 Mar 14 2018 wmillAUTOINC1.frm
-rw-r-----. 1 mysql mysql   131072 Mar 14 2018 wmillAUTOINC1.ibd

The ibd file contains the data, while frm file contains the structure information.
Keeping aside ANY discussion about if this is safe, if it transactional and more… when we had some major crash and data corruption this approach had being helpful.
Being able to read from this file was the easiest way to get the information we need.
Simple tools like DBSake was making the task quite trivial, also allowing us to script it when in need to run long, complex tedious data recovery:

[root@master1 windmills]# /opt/tools/dbsake frmdump wmillAUTOINC1.frm
--
-- Table structure for table `wmillAUTOINC1`
-- Created with MySQL Version 5.7.20
--
 
CREATE TABLE `wmillAUTOINC1` (
  `id` bigint(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `uuid` char(36) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `millid` smallint(6) NOT NULL,
  `kwatts_s` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `date` date NOT NULL,
  `location` varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `active` tinyint(2) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
  `time` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  `strrecordtype` char(3) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `IDX_millid` (`millid`,`active`),
  KEY `IDX_active` (`id`,`active`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC

Of course, if the frm file was also corrupted we could try to get the information from the ibdata dictionary.
If that is corrupted as well (trust me I saw all these) … well last resource was hoping customer has a recent table definition store somewhere, but as mentioned before, we are not so diligent, are we?
NOW in MySQL8 we do not have FRM files, the were drop.
Even more interesting is the fact that we do not have the same dictionary, most of the things that we knew had change, including the dictionary location, so what can be done?

Well Oracle had moved the FRM information and more, to what is call Serialized Dictionary Information (SDI), the SDI is wrote INSIDE the ibd file, and represent the redundant copy of the information contain in the data dictionary.

The SDI is update/modified by DDL operations on tables that reside in that tablespace.

This is it, if you have file per table normally you will have in that file ONLY the SDI for that table, but if you have multiple table on a tablespace, the SDI information will refer to ALL the tables.

To extract this information out from IBD files, Oracle provide an utility call ibd2sdi.

The application parses the SDI information and report a JSON file that can be easily manipulate to extract/build the table definition.
One exception is represented by Partitioned tables, the SDI information is contained ONLY in the first partition, and in case you drop it, is moved to the next one, will show that later.

Let us see now how it works.
In the next examples I will look for Tables name, attribute and datatype starting from the dictionary tables.
To take the info I will do this:

/opt/mysql_templates/mysql-8P/bin/./ibd2sdi   /opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/mysql.ibd |\
jq  '.[]?|.[]?|.dd_object?|("------------------------------------"?,"TABLE NAME = ",.name?,"****",(.columns?|.[]?|(.name?,.column_type_utf8?)))'

The result will be something like:

"------------------------------------"
"TABLE NAME = "
"tables"
"****"
"id"
"bigint(20) unsigned"
"schema_id"
"bigint(20) unsigned"
"name"
"varchar(64)"
"type"
"enum('BASE TABLE','VIEW','SYSTEM VIEW')"
"engine"
"varchar(64)"
"mysql_version_id"
"int(10) unsigned"
"row_format"
"enum('Fixed','Dynamic','Compressed','Redundant','Compact','Paged')"
"collation_id"
"bigint(20) unsigned"
"comment"
"varchar(2048)"
<snip>
"------------------------------------"
"TABLE NAME = "
"tablespaces"
"****"
"id"
"bigint(20) unsigned"
"name"
"varchar(259)"
"options"
"mediumtext"
"se_private_data"
"mediumtext"
"comment"
"varchar(2048)"
"engine"
"varchar(64)"
"DB_TRX_ID"
""
"DB_ROLL_PTR"
""

As you cannot see because I cut the output for brevity, but you can if you run the above command by yourself, what I will get retrieve ALL the tables information, residing in the IBD. The other thing I hope you have noticed, is that I am NOT parsing ibdata, but mysql.ibd, why? Because the dictionary was moved out from ibdata and is now in mysql.ibd. Look what happens if I try to parse ibdata:

[root@master1 ~]# /opt/mysql_templates/mysql-8P/bin/./ibd2sdi   /opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/ibdata1 |jq '.'
[INFO] ibd2sdi: SDI is empty.

Be very careful in not messing up with your mysql.ibd file. Now what I can do to take information about my wmillAUTOINC1 table in MySQL8? That is quite simple:

/opt/mysql_templates/mysql-8P/bin/./ibd2sdi   /opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/windmills/wmillAUTOINC.ibd |jq '.'
[
  "ibd2sdi",
  {
    "type": 1,
    "id": 1068,
    "object": {
      "mysqld_version_id": 80013,
      "dd_version": 80013,
      "sdi_version": 1,
      "dd_object_type": "Table",
      "dd_object": {
        "name": "wmillAUTOINC",
        "mysql_version_id": 80011,
        "created": 20180925095853,
        "last_altered": 20180925095853,
        "hidden": 1,
        "options": "avg_row_length=0;key_block_size=0;keys_disabled=0;pack_record=1;row_type=2;stats_auto_recalc=0;stats_sample_pages=0;",
        "columns": [
          {
            "name": "id",
            "type": 9,
            "is_nullable": false,
            "is_zerofill": false,
            "is_unsigned": false,
            "is_auto_increment": true,
            "is_virtual": false,
            "hidden": 1,
            "ordinal_position": 1,
            "char_length": 11,
            "numeric_precision": 19,
            "numeric_scale": 0,
            "numeric_scale_null": false,
            "datetime_precision": 0,
            "datetime_precision_null": 1,
            "has_no_default": false,
            "default_value_null": false,
            "srs_id_null": true,
            "srs_id": 0,
            "default_value": "AAAAAAAAAAA=",
            "default_value_utf8_null": true,
            "default_value_utf8": "",
            "default_option": "",
            "update_option": "",
            "comment": "",
            "generation_expression": "",
            "generation_expression_utf8": "",
            "options": "interval_count=0;",
            "se_private_data": "table_id=1838;",
            "column_key": 2,
            "column_type_utf8": "bigint(11)",
            "elements": [],
            "collation_id": 83,
            "is_explicit_collation": false
          },
<SNIP>
        "indexes": [
          {
            "name": "PRIMARY",
            "hidden": false,
            "is_generated": false,
            "ordinal_position": 1,
            "comment": "",
            "options": "flags=0;",
            "se_private_data": "id=2261;root=4;space_id=775;table_id=1838;trx_id=6585972;",
            "type": 1,
            "algorithm": 2,
            "is_algorithm_explicit": false,
            "is_visible": true,
            "engine": "InnoDB",
<Snip>
        ],
        "foreign_keys": [],
        "partitions": [],
        "collation_id": 83
      }
    }
  },
  {
    "type": 2,
    "id": 780,
    "object": {
      "mysqld_version_id": 80011,
      "dd_version": 80011,
      "sdi_version": 1,
      "dd_object_type": "Tablespace",
      "dd_object": {
        "name": "windmills/wmillAUTOINC",
        "comment": "",
        "options": "",
        "se_private_data": "flags=16417;id=775;server_version=80011;space_version=1;",
        "engine": "InnoDB",
        "files": [
          {
            "ordinal_position": 1,
            "filename": "./windmills/wmillAUTOINC.ibd",
            "se_private_data": "id=775;"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
]

The JSON will contains:

• A section describing the DB object at high level
• Array of columns and related information
• Array of indexes
• Partition information (not here but in the next example)
• Table space information

That is a lot more details than what we had in the FRM and is quite relevant and interesting information as well. Once extracted the SDI any JSON parser tool script can generate the information for the SQL DDL. I mention Partitions, let us cover it a second a bit more, given they can be tricky. As mentioned the SDI information is present ONLY in the first partition. All the others will have ONLY the tablespace information. Given that the first thing to do is to identify which Partition is the first… OR simple try to access all and when you are able to get the details just extract them. The process is the same:

[root@master1 ~]# /opt/mysql_templates/mysql-8P/bin/./ibd2sdi   /opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170301.ibd |jq '.'
[
  "ibd2sdi",
  {
    "type": 1,
    "id": 1460,
    "object": {
      "mysqld_version_id": 80013,
      "dd_version": 80013,
      "sdi_version": 1,
      "dd_object_type": "Table",
      "dd_object": {
        "name": "wmillAUTOINCPART",
        "mysql_version_id": 80013,
        "created": 20181125110300,
        "last_altered": 20181125110300,
        "hidden": 1,
        "options": "avg_row_length=0;key_block_size=0;keys_disabled=0;pack_record=1;row_type=2;stats_auto_recalc=0;stats_sample_pages=0;",
        "columns": [<snip>
          "schema_ref": "windmills",
        "se_private_id": 18446744073709552000,
        "engine": "InnoDB",
        "last_checked_for_upgrade_version_id": 80013,
        "comment": "",
        "se_private_data": "autoinc=31080;version=2;",
        "row_format": 2,
        "partition_type": 7,
        "partition_expression": "to_days(`date`)",
        "partition_expression_utf8": "to_days(`date`)",
        "default_partitioning": 1,
        "subpartition_type": 0,
        "subpartition_expression": "",
        "subpartition_expression_utf8": "",
        "default_subpartitioning": 0,
       ],
<snip>
        "foreign_keys": [],
        "partitions": [
          {
            "name": "PT20170301",
            "parent_partition_id": 18446744073709552000,
            "number": 0,
            "se_private_id": 1847,
            "description_utf8": "736754",
            "engine": "InnoDB",
            "comment": "",
            "options": "",
            "se_private_data": "autoinc=0;version=0;",
            "values": [
              {
                "max_value": false,
                "null_value": false,
                "list_num": 0,
                "column_num": 0,
                "value_utf8": "736754"
              }
            ],

The difference as you can see is the section related to Partitions and Sub Partition that will be filled with all the details you may need to recreate the partitions. We will have:

• Partition type
• Partition expression
• Partition values
• …more

Same for sub partitions. Now again see what happens if I parse the second Partition:

[root@master1 ~]# /opt/mysql_templates/mysql-8P/bin/./ibd2sdi   /opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170401.ibd |jq '.'
[
  "ibd2sdi",
  {
    "type": 2,
    "id": 790,
    "object": {
      "mysqld_version_id": 80011,
      "dd_version": 80011,
      "sdi_version": 1,
      "dd_object_type": "Tablespace",
      "dd_object": {
        "name": "windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170401",
        "comment": "",
        "options": "",
        "se_private_data": "flags=16417;id=785;server_version=80011;space_version=1;",
        "engine": "InnoDB",
        "files": [
          {
            "ordinal_position": 1,
            "filename": "./windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170401.ibd",
            "se_private_data": "id=785;"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
]

I will get only the information about the Tablespace but not the table. As promise let me show you now what happen if I delete the first partition, and the second one will become the first:

(root@localhost) [windmills]>alter table wmillAUTOINCPART drop partition PT20170301;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (1.84 sec)
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

[root@master1 ~]# /opt/mysql_templates/mysql-8P/bin/./ibd2sdi   /opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170401.ibd |jq '.'|more
[
  "ibd2sdi",
  {
    "type": 1,
    "id": 1461,
    "object": {
      "mysqld_version_id": 80013,
      "dd_version": 80013,
      "sdi_version": 1,
      "dd_object_type": "Table",
      "dd_object": {
        "name": "wmillAUTOINCPART",
        "mysql_version_id": 80013,
        "created": 20181129130834,
        "last_altered": 20181129130834,
        "hidden": 1,
        "options": "avg_row_length=0;key_block_size=0;keys_disabled=0;pack_record=1;row_type=2;stats_auto_recalc=0;stats_sample_pages=0;",
        "columns": [
          {
            "name": "id",
            "type": 9,
            "is_nullable": false,
            "is_zerofill": false,
            "is_unsigned": false,
            "is_auto_increment": true,
            "is_virtual": false,
            "hidden": 1,
            "ordinal_position": 1,

As also mention before the SDI is update at each DDL, and here we go, I will have all the information on the NOW FIRST partition. Please note the created attribute between the first time I query the Other partition and the one I had from now:

/opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170301.ibd
       "created": 20181125110300,

/opt/mysql_instances/master8/data/windmills/wmillAUTOINCPART#P#PT20170401.ibd
       "created": 20181129130834,

  To be clear the second created is NOW (PT20170401) when I did the drop on the other partition (PT20170301).

Conclusions

At the end this solution is definitely more powerful of the FRM files.
It will allow us to parse the file and identify the table definition more easily, get much more details and information.

The problems will raise when and IF the IBD file will become corrupt.

As for manual For InnoDB, an SDI record requires a single index page, which is 16KB in size by default. However, SDI data is compressed to reduce the storage footprint.

Which it means that for each Table I have a page, if I associate record=table.

Which means that in case of IBD corruption I should (likely) be able to read those pages, unless bad (very bad) luck.

Still wonder how the dimension of an IBD affects the SDI retrieval, given I had not tried it yet but will let you know.

On another side I am working on a script to facilitate the SQL generation, still not ready but you can find it here

Last note but keep this in mind! It is state in the manual but in a hidden place small letters: DDL operations take longer due to writing to storage, undo logs, and redo logs instead of .frm files.

References

https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/ibd2sdi.html

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/serialized-dictionary-information.html

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/data-dictionary-limitations.html