Fastest way to check if InnoDB table has changed

For the table mydb.mytable, run this query:

SELECT update_time
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema='mydb'
AND table_name='mytable';

If you want to know what tables have changed in the last 5 minutes, run this:

SELECT table_schema,table_name,update_time
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE update_time > (NOW() - INTERVAL 5 MINUTE);

Give it a Try !!!

UPDATE 2011-12-21 20:04 EDT

My employer (DB/Wweb hosting comany) has a client with 112,000 InnoDB tables. It is very difficult to read INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES during peak hours. I have an alternate suggestion:

If you have innodb_file_per_table enabled and all the InnoDB tables are stored in .ibd files, there is a way to ascertain the time of the last update (up to the minute).

For the table mydb.mytable, do the following in the operating system:

$ cd /var/lib/mysql/mydb
$ ls -l mytable.ibd | awk '{print $4,$5}'

This timestamp is from the OS. You can't go wrong on this one.

UPDATE 2011-12-21 22:04 EDT [mysqld] innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct=0;

Add this to my.cnf, restart mysql, and all InnoDB tables will experience fast flushes from the buffer pool.

To avoid restarting, just run

mysql> SET GLOBAL innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct=0;

UPDATE 2013-06-27 07:15 EDT

When it comes to retrieving the date and time for a file, ls has the --time-style option:

$ cd /var/lib/mysql/mydb
$ ls -l --time-style="+%s" mytable.ibd | awk '{print $6}'

You can compare the timestamp of the file against UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()).

I think I've found the solution. For some time I was looking at Percona Server to replace my MySQL servers, and now i think there is a good reason for this.

Percona server introduces many new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables like INNODB_TABLE_STATS, which isn't available in standard MySQL server. When you do:

SELECT rows, modified FROM information_schema.innodb_table_stats WHERE table_schema='db' AND table_name='table'

You get actual row count and a counter. The Official documentation says the following about this field:

If the value of modified column exceeds “rows / 16” or 2000000000, the statistics recalculation is done when innodb_stats_auto_update == 1. We can estimate the oldness of the statistics by this value.

So this counter wraps every once in a while, but you can make a checksum of the number of rows and the counter, and then with every modification of the table you get a unique checksum. E.g.:

SELECT MD5(CONCAT(rows,'_',modified)) AS checksum FROM information_schema.innodb_table_stats WHERE table_schema='db' AND table_name='table';

I was going do upgrade my servers to Percona server anyway so this bounding is not an issue for me. Managing hundreds of triggers and adding fields to tables is a major pain for this application, because it's very late in development.

This is the PHP function I've come up with to make sure that tables can be checksummed whatever engine and server is used:

function checksum_table($input_tables){
    if(!$input_tables) return false; // Sanity check
    $tables = (is_array($input_tables)) ? $input_tables : array($input_tables); // Make $tables always an array
    $where = "";
    $checksum = "";
    $found_tables = array();
    $tables_indexed = array();
    foreach($tables as $table_name){
        $tables_indexed[$table_name] = true; // Indexed array for faster searching
        if(strstr($table_name,".")){ // If we are passing db.table_name
            $table_name_split = explode(".",$table_name);
            $where .= "(table_schema='".$table_name_split[0]."' AND table_name='".$table_name_split[1]."') OR ";
        }else{
            $where .= "(table_schema=DATABASE() AND table_name='".$table_name."') OR ";
        }
    }
    if($where != ""){ // Sanity check
        $where = substr($where,0,-4); // Remove the last "OR"
        $get_chksum = mysql_query("SELECT table_schema, table_name, rows, modified FROM information_schema.innodb_table_stats WHERE ".$where);
        while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($get_chksum)){
            if($tables_indexed[$row[table_name]]){ // Not entirely foolproof, but saves some queries like "SELECT DATABASE()" to find out the current database
                $found_tables[$row[table_name]] = true;
            }elseif($tables_indexed[$row[table_schema].".".$row[table_name]]){
                $found_tables[$row[table_schema].".".$row[table_name]] = true;
            }
            $checksum .= "_".$row[rows]."_".$row[modified]."_";
        }
    }

    foreach($tables as $table_name){
        if(!$found_tables[$table_name]){ // Table is not found in information_schema.innodb_table_stats (Probably not InnoDB table or not using Percona Server)
            $get_chksum = mysql_query("CHECKSUM TABLE ".$table_name); // Checksuming the old-fashioned way
            $chksum = mysql_fetch_assoc($get_chksum);
            $checksum .= "_".$chksum[Checksum]."_";
        }
    }

    $checksum = sprintf("%s",crc32($checksum)); // Using crc32 because it's faster than md5(). Must be returned as string to prevent PHPs signed integer problems.

    return $checksum;
}

You can use it like this:

// checksum a signle table in the current db
$checksum = checksum_table("test_table");

// checksum a signle table in db other than the current
$checksum = checksum_table("other_db.test_table");

// checksum multiple tables at once. It's faster when using Percona server, because all tables are checksummed via one select.
$checksum = checksum_table(array("test_table, "other_db.test_table")); 

I hope this saves some trouble to other people having the same problem.