Collation changes to a large table

MySQL & MariaDB Percona Server for MySQL 8.0
1

Hi,

Trying to do a collation change on a very large table ( with 5 billion rows) and resulted in mysqlb instance crash. Any advice on this get this done quickly ?

Any guidance with pt-online-schema-change ? Do we have other alternatives like mysqldump?

Thanks!

2

pt-online-schema-change is a great fit for this. mysqldump will require the table to be completely offline, so that’s probably not helpful. The out of box defaults for pt-online-schema-change are pretty good, so I’d go with that and tweak as necessary.

3

Thank you Matt. We are doing this in our test environment. So downtime is fine. However its always great to use Percona tools when available which can simplify things.

When you have mentioned about tweaking. Could you please elaborate by giving us examples for us to try this out?

4

Go with the defaults until something doesn’t look right. 99% of the time, this will not happen and the tool will just work. There are advanced options for changing chunk time, monitoring replicas, etc