Note: This article is about the WHERE extension to SHOW. I specifically use SHOW STATUS as an example, but WHERE is an extension to many SHOW statements.

Often DBAs will assess the health of a system by looking at some of the status variables returned by SHOW GLOBAL STATUS (specifying GLOBAL is important; remember that SHOW STATUS is the same as SHOW SESSION STATUS).

There are many status variables that SHOW GLOBAL STATUS returns. (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS on a Windows machine, MySQL version 5.0.67 returned 249, 5.1.22 returned 256 and 6.0.6-alpha returned 295 status variables!). I have used the SHOW STATUS LIKE syntax to help give me the output I really want, particularly when I forget the exact names of the status variables I am