Baron Schwartz's Blog

MySQL command-line tip: compare result sets

Wed, Mar 25, 2009 in Databases Open Source

Here’s a quick productivity tip: when optimizing queries by rewriting them to different forms that should return the same results, you can verify that you get the same results by taking a checksum of them.

Just set your pager to md5sum:

mysql> pager md5sum -
PAGER set to 'md5sum -'
mysql> select * from test;
a09bc56ac9aa0cbcc659c3d566c2c7e4  -
4096 rows in set (0.00 sec)

I'm Baron Schwartz, the founder and CEO of VividCortex. I am the author of High Performance MySQL and lots of open-source software for performance analysis, monitoring, and system administration. I contribute to various database communities such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redis and MongoDB. More about me.

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