`ERROR 1114 (HY000) the table ... is full` with innodb_file_per_table set to autoextend I have a MySQL database that holds a large amount of data (100-200GB - a bunch of scientific measurements). The vast majority of the data is stored in one table Sample. Now I'm creating a slave replica of the database and I wanted to take the advantages of innodb_file_per_table during the process. So I set innodb_file_per_table in my slave configuration and imported the dump of the database. To my surprise, it failed with 


  ERROR 1114 (HY000) at line 5602: The table 'Sample' is full


The file Sample.ibd is currently about 93GB, with more than 600GB free space available on the partition, so it's not a disk free-space issue. Neither it seems to be hitting any kind of file-system limit (I'm using ext4).

I'd be grateful for any ideas what could be the cause, or what to investigate.



Update: I'm using mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.1.66, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64).

SELECT @@datadir; -- returns `/home/var/lib/mysql/`
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%innodb_data_file_path%'; -- ibdata1:10M:autoextend 

df -h /home/var/lib/mysql/
768G   31G  699G   5% /home
FACTS

You said you are using ext4. File size limit is 16TB. Thus, Sample.ibd should not be full.

You said your innodb_data_file_path is ibdata1:10M:autoextend. Thus, the ibdata1 file itself has no cap to its size except from the OS.

Why is this message coming up at all? Notice the message is "The table ... is full", not "The disk ... is full". This table full condition is from a logical standpoint. Think about InnoDB. What interactions are going on ?

My guess is InnoDB is attempting to load 93GB of data as a single transaction. Where would the Table is Full message emanate from? I would look at the ibdata1, not in terms its physical size (which you already ruled out), but in terms of what transaction limits are being reached.

What is inside ibdata1 when innodb_file_per_table is enabled and you load new data into MySQL?


Data Dictionary
Double Write Buffer


Safety Net to Prevent Data Corruption
Helps Bypass OS for Caching

Insert Buffer (Streamlines Changes to Secondary Indexes)
Rollback Segments
Undo Logs
Click Here to see a Pictorial Representation of ibdata1


My suspicions tell me that the Undo Logs and/or Redo Logs are to blame.

What are these logs? According to the Book



Chapter 10 : "Storage Engines" Page 203 Paragraphs 3,4 say the following:


  The InnoDB engine keeps two types of logs: an undo log and a redo log. The purpose of an undo log is to roll back transactions, as well as to display the older versions of the data for queries running in the transaction isolation level that requires it. The code that handles the undo log can be found in storage/innobase/buf/log/log0log.c.
  
  The purpose of the redo log is to store the information to be used in crash recovery. It permits the recovery process to re-execute the transactions that may or may not have completed before the crash. After re-executing those transactions, the database is brought to a consistent state. The code dealing with the redo log can be found in storage/innobase/log/log0recv.c.


ANALYSIS

There are 1023 Undo Logs inside ibdata1 (See Rollback Segments and Undo Space). Since the undo logs keep copies of data as they appeared before the reload, all 1023 Undo Logs have reached its limit. From another perspective, all 1023 Undo Logs may be dedicated to the one transaction that loads the Sample table.

BUT WAIT...

You are probably saying "I am loading an empty Sample table". How are Undo Logs involved? Before the Sample table was loaded with 93GB of data, it was empty. Representing every  row that did not exist must take up some housecleaning space in the Undo Logs. Filling up 1023 Undo Logs seems trivial given the amount of data pouring into ibdata1. I am not the first person to suspect this:

From the MySQL 4.1 Documentation, note Posted by Chris Calender on September 4 2009 4:25pm:


  Note that in 5.0 (pre-5.0.85) and in 5.1 (pre-5.1.38), you could receive the "table is full" error for an InnoDB table if InnoDB runs out of undo slots (bug #18828).


Here is the bug report for MySQL 5.0 : http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=18828

SUGGESTIONS

When you create the mysqldump of the Sample table, please use --no-autocommit

mysqldump --no-autocommit ... mydb Sample &gt; Sample.sql


This will put an explicit COMMIT; after every INSERT. Then, reload the table.

If this does not work (you are not going to like this), do this

mysqldump --no-autocommit --skip-extended-insert ... mydb Sample &gt; Sample.sql


This will make each INSERT have just one row. The mysqldump will be much larger (10+ times bigger) and could take 10 to 100 times longer to reload.

In either case, this will spare the Undo Logs from being inundated.

Give it a Try !!!

UPDATE 2013-06-03 13:05 EDT

ADDITIONAL SUGGESTION

If the InnoDB system table (a.k.a ibdata1) strikes a filesize limit and Undo Logs cannot be used, you could just add another system tablespace (ibdata2).

I just encountered this situation just two days ago. I updated my old post with what I did: See Database Design - Creating Multiple databases to avoid the headache of limit on table size

In essence, you have to change innodb_data_file_path to accommodate a new system tablespace file. Let me explain how:

SCENARIO

On disk (ext3), my client's server had the following:

[root@l*****]# ls -l ibd*
-rw-rw---- 1 s-em7-mysql s-em7-mysql     362807296 Jun  2 00:15 ibdata1
-rw-rw---- 1 s-em7-mysql s-em7-mysql 2196875759616 Jun  2 00:15 ibdata2


The setting was

innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:346M;ibdata2:500M:autoextend:max:10240000M


Note that ibdata2 grew to 2196875759616 which is 2145386484M.

I had to embed the filesize of ibdata2 into innodb_data_file_path and add ibdata3

innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:346M;ibdata2:2196875759616;ibdata3:10M:autoextend


When I restarted mysqld, it worked:

[root@l*****]# ls -l ibd*
-rw-rw---- 1 s-em7-mysql s-em7-mysql     362807296 Jun  3 17:02 ibdata1
-rw-rw---- 1 s-em7-mysql s-em7-mysql 2196875759616 Jun  3 17:02 ibdata2
-rw-rw---- 1 s-em7-mysql s-em7-mysql   32315015168 Jun  3 17:02 ibdata3


In 40 hours, ibdata3 grew to 31G. MySQL was once again working.