While working on something unrelated, I came across the server status flags that are exposed to client connections by the client library. I have never used those flags myself, but as I understand they are meant to provide some context to applications and proxies which would otherwise have to do some fairly expensive things to obtain that information.
What stroke me as odd is that there is no way to see those flags
from interactive sessions in the MySQL command-line client. Like
applications or proxies, human beings need context, especially
when multi-tasking and switching between multiple tabs or
windows. That's precisely the reason why the command prompt in
the mysql
client can be customized via the …