Delete MySQL Binary Logs

May 22, 2014 Add a comment

cheat-sheet articles are about code snippets that I need every once in a while, and which I constantly forget about.

The binary log contains “events” that describe database changes such as table creation operations or changes to table data. It also contains events for statements that potentially could have made changes (for example, a DELETE which matched no rows), unless row-based logging is used. The binary log also contains information about how long each statement took that updated data.

The binary log is primarily needed for master-slave-setups and data recovery operations. Files are never deleted and pile up in the datadir (e.g. /var/lib/mysql), named mysqld-bin.000001, mysqld-bin.000002, … (Alternatively, the files might be named hostname-bin.000001, …)

To get rid of them, run the following two commands as MySQL’s admin user:

mysql> FLUSH LOGS;
mysql> RESET MASTER;

The first command flushes unsaved transactions to the database, and the second one deletes all binary logs.

If you do not need the binary logs at all, you can also disable them entirely by removing the log-bin option from your my.cnf configuration file.