mysqlcheck — a table maintenance program

Synopsis

mysqlcheck [options] [db_name [tbl_name ...]]

Description

The mysqlcheck client performs table maintenance: It checks, repairs, optimizes, or analyzes tables.

Each table is locked and therefore unavailable to other sessions while it is being processed, although for check operations, the table is locked with a READ lock only. Table maintenance operations can be time-consuming, particularly for large tables. If you use the --databases or --all-databases option to process all tables in one or more databases, an invocation of mysqlcheck might take a long time. (This is also true for mysql_upgrade because that program invokes mysqlcheck to check all tables and repair them if necessary.)

mysqlcheck is similar in function to myisamchk, but works differently. The main operational difference is that mysqlcheck must be used when the mysqld server is running, whereas myisamchk should be used when it is not. The benefit of using mysqlcheck is that you do not have to stop the server to perform table maintenance.

mysqlcheck uses the SQL statements CHECK TABLE, REPAIR TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, and OPTIMIZE TABLE in a convenient way for the user. It determines which statements to use for the operation you want to perform, and then sends the statements to the server to be executed.

The MyISAM storage engine supports all four maintenance operations, so mysqlcheck can be used to perform any of them on MyISAM tables. Other storage engines do not necessarily support all operations. In such cases, an error message is displayed. For example, if test.t is a MEMORY table, an attempt to check it produces this result:

shell> mysqlcheck test t
test.t
note     : The storage engine for the table doesn´t support check

If mysqlcheck is unable to repair a table, see the MariaDB Knowledge Base for manual table repair strategies. This will be the case, for example, for InnoDB tables, which can be checked with CHECK TABLE, but not repaired with REPAIR TABLE.

The use of mysqlcheck with partitioned tables is not supported.

Caution

It is best to make a backup of a table before performing a table repair operation; under some circumstances the operation might cause data loss. Possible causes include but are not limited to file system errors.

There are three general ways to invoke mysqlcheck:

shell> mysqlcheck [options] db_name [tbl_name ...]
shell> mysqlcheck [options] --databases db_name ...
shell> mysqlcheck [options] --all-databases

If you do not name any tables following db_name or if you use the --databases or --all-databases option, entire databases are checked.

mysqlcheck has a special feature compared to other client programs. The default behavior of checking tables (--check) can be changed by renaming the binary. If you want to have a tool that repairs tables by default, you should just make a copy of mysqlcheck named mysqlrepair, or make a symbolic link to mysqlcheck named mysqlrepair. If you invoke mysqlrepair, it repairs tables.

The following names can be used to change mysqlcheck default behavior.

mysqlrepair The default option is --repair
mysqlanalyze The default option is --analyze
mysqloptimize The default option is --optimize

mysqlcheck supports the following options, which can be specified on the command line or in the [mysqlcheck] and [client] option file groups. The -c, -r, -a and -o options are exclusive to each other.

See Also

For more information, please refer to the MariaDB Knowledge Base, available online at https://mariadb.com/kb/

Author

MariaDB Foundation (http://www.mariadb.org/).

Info

9 May 2017 MariaDB 10.3 MariaDB Database System