Ytukyg

I am trying to understand a MySQL error and it is related to some defaults Rails generates with ActiveRecord migrations. Given this:

rails generate migration AddDetailsToProducts supplier:index:references{polymorphic}



class AddDetailsToProducts < ActiveRecord::Migration

  def change

    add_reference :products, :supplier, polymorphic: true, index: true, foreign_key: true

  end

end

So what does this do? First, let's look at polymorphic. Polymorphic will create a supplier_type VARCHAR(255) and supplier_id INT column in products. I believe the VARCHAR is set to 256 characters, since early versions of MySQL did not support more. But remember that VARCHAR columns in the database are variable length, so there's no storage advantage to a ten character value in a VARCHAR(255) versus a VARCHAR(20).

references adds the supplier_type and supplier_id as foreign keys of products to the suppliers primary key. A FOREIGN KEY is a field (or collection of fields) in one table that refers to the PRIMARY KEY in another table. It is a key used to link two tables together.

So I think "add_reference" does something like this:

CREATE TABLE products (

  PRIMARY KEY (id),

  FOREIGN KEY (supplier_id) REFERENCES suppliers(id)

  FOREIGN KEY (supplier_type) REFERENCES suppliers(id)

)

CREATE  INDEX `index_suppliers_on_supplier_type`  ON `suppliers` (`supplier_type`) 

CREATE  INDEX `index_suppliers_on_supplier_id`  ON `suppliers` (`supplier_id`) 

Now I received an error like this:

Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes: CREATE INDEX
index_suppliers_on_supplier_type ON suppliers (supplier_type)

So what we have is a supplier_type column which is VARCHAR(255) and we attempted to place an index on it. I am using the utf8_unicode_ci coallation. My understanding is this uses 1 to 3 bytes per character. So even if this was to use 3 bytes for all characters with a maximum of 256 characters, that is 256 * 3 = 768. One byte over. It really doesn't make sense. Is the solution really just to add a limit to the maximum character size for the column? Am I understanding this correctly?

Because when I do this, the error goes away:

class ChangeSuppliers < ActiveRecord::Migration

  def change

    change_column :suppliers, :supplier_type, :string, limit: 191

  end

end

The collation is just the order, the real cause is the character set. This answer shows a couple of work-arounds. An index limit like you've done it also works.

Its been a very long time (MySQL-4.0) since 255 what a varchar limit - its rather and arbitrary choice and a choice of limit based on your data is the best approach.

In addition to index sizes being larger for larger lengths, joins involving these sometimes use the MEMORY storage engine result in varchar(X) being converted to char(X) which can use a lot more memory.