Some days ago we found very interesting bug report with my friend: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=71879

Problem is that, if a client moves binlog files to the other folder, stops MySQL server, update in the config file bin_log and bin_log_index values for a new path and starts server again, then the result of SHOW BINARY LOG command will be wrong:

mysql> show binary logs;
+-------------------------+-----------+
| Log_name                | File_size |
+-------------------------+-----------+
| cluster-repo-bin.000001 |       120 |
| cluster-repo-bin.000002 |         0 |
| cluster-repo-bin.000003 |         0 |
| cluster-repo-bin.000004 |         0 |
| cluster-repo-bin.000005 |         0 |
| cluster-repo-bin.000006 |       120 |
+-------------------------+-----------+

As you see, the size of some binlog files are zero. So why?

If you …

According to this bug report http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=79151

when client tries to create a new table with not existing (or write permission denied) datadir, then he gets an error message like this: ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error -1 from storage engine

As you see it is not informative error message, we don’t know what’s wrong at the backend. But in the version 5.7 it seems this problem was resolved already.

I discovered that at the low level of innodb storage engine, program tries to create subfolders, when occurs a problem it checks system error partly in the file storage/innobase/fil/fil0fil.cc:

success = os_file_create_subdirs_if_needed(path);

os_file_create_subdirs_if_needed function in the storage/innobase/os/os0file.cc file checks system errors but returns only boolean value depending on the …

My first bug fix was about a year ago. You can see bug report here: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=72259

If to shortly explain, so problem was that when you make file system read only, and try to start the server, it fails. And there is no exact error message in the log files which explains the problem correctly.

I added to the sql/mysqld.cc file a simple function whitch checks the given path’s permission and returns the state code:

// checks if file system is read-only

int is_filesystem_read_only(char const* name) {

    if (access(name, W_OK) == -1) {

        if (access(name, R_OK) == 0) {

            return R_OK; // read only

        } else if (access(name, F_OK) == 0) {

      …

Years ago when I worked for the MySQL Support organization at the original MySQL AB, we spoke about MySQL Support as insurance and focused on a value proposition similar to that of car insurance. For your car to be fully covered, you must purchase car insurance before the incident happens – in fact most places around the world require automobile insurance. Similarly with many organizations, any production-use technology might be mandated to have its own insurance in the way of 24/7 support.

I think however this is a very one-sided view that does not capture the full value (and ROI) that a MySQL Support contract with Percona provides. Let’s look at the different dimensions of value it provides based on the different support cases we have received throughout the years.

Reduce and Prevent …

I see that MySQL 5.5.21 has just been released. This sounds interesting. I’m mainly running 5.5.16 which has been broadly stable, but I have been caught by a few important issues which 5.5.21 fixes according to the change list:

• Bug #57480
• Bug #61104
• Bug #54035

These together with a few earlier fixes after 5.5.16 are certainly interesting to me, so I’m eager to try out 5.5.21 and see how it fairs.