Today I am going to provide some details on the last item in my list of problems with Oracle's way of MySQL server development, maintenance of MySQL Manual. I stated that:
"MySQL Manual still have many details missing and is not fixed fast enough.
Moreover, it is not open source..."Let me explain the above:

1. MySQL Reference Manual is not open source. It used to be built from DocBook XML sources. Probably that's still the case. But you can not find the source code in open repositories (please, correct me if I am wrong, I tried to search...) That's because it is NOT open source. It says this clearly in …

I have some free time today, but I am still lazy enough to work on numerous planned and pending "ToDo" kind of posts, so why not to continue review of older MySQL bugs I am subscribed to. Today I am going to list 15 more bugs reported more than a year ago and still not fixed:

• Bug #85805 - "Incorrect ER_BAD_NULL_ERROR after LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE". This detailed bug report by Tsubasa Tanaka stays "Verified" for more than a year already. It's a great example of gdb use for MySQL troubleshooting. Setting a couple of breakpoints may really help to understand how MySQL works and why some …

Back in January 2014, some time after many nice people kindly asked me to shut up stop writing about MySQL bugs on Facebook several times per day, I decided to start reading the fine MySQL Manual more carefully than before and report not only typos there, but also any topic or detail not properly explained. Usually these reports, tagged as "missing manual", were the result of careful study of the documentation based on real user question or customer issue. So, most of these reports came from real life, and missing information badly affected poor MySQL users.

Today, for this issue #50 in my series of posts about MySQL bugs, I decided to list and …

As you maybe noted, in several recent posts I've provided some additional details for slides used during my FOSDEM talk on profiling MySQL. The only part not covered yet is related to using Poor Man's Profiler (and pt-pmp version of it). I see no reason to explain what it does and how to use it once again, but would like to show several recent enough MySQL bug reports where this tool was essential to find, explain or demonstrate the problem.

…

Users had to identify the reasons for MySQL performance problems somehow well before famous Performance Schema appeared in MySQL 5.5.3, and even before Domas invented his Poor Man's Profiler. Poor users had to use some OS-level tools, and among these tools the most important one was, probably, oprofile.

oprofile is a system-wide statistical profiling tool for Linux available since 2001 and 2.4.x kernels. It was applied to MySQL for many …

It's time to summarize the year of 2016. As a kind of a weird summary, in this post I'd like to share a list of MySQL bug reports I've created in 2016 that are still remaining "Verified" today:

• Bug #79831 - "Unexpected error message on crash-safe slave with max_relay_log_size set". According to Umesh this is not repeatable with 5.7. The fact that I've reported the bug on January 4 probably means I was working at that time. I should not repeat this mistake again next year.
• Bug #80067 - "Index on BIT column is NOT used when column name only is used in WHERE clause". People say the same problem happens with INT and, what may be even less expected, BOOLEAN columns.
• …

This week I had to deal with some unusual problems. But let me start with Percona's xtrabackup, software that I consider a key component of many current production MySQL setups and use regularly. Recently new minor versions of XtraBackup were released, check the details on 2.4.5, for example. It made a step towards support of MariaDB 10.2, but it's still a long way to go, see this pull request #200.

My main problem with xtrabackup, though, is not with lack of support of MariaDB 10,2-specific features. Why should they care, after all... The problem is that old well known bugs and problems are not resolved, those that may affect all MySQL versions, forks and environments. Check  …

In the previous post in this series I've concluded that metadata locks are acquired in "batches" and the function that implements this is called MDL_context::acquire_locks. Let's check quickly what it does to confirm where wait for metadata lock really happens. We need this to proceed finally from studying what locks are set and when (this is a long and complicated topic to spend time on out of general interest) to more practical topic: how to find the session that holds the blocking metadata lock in MySQL versions before 5.7.x.

I'll continue to use Percona Server 5.6.27 for now, just because I have it installed and have a source code at hand. So, MDL_context class is defined in sql/mdl.h file as follows:

/**
  Context of the owner of metadata locks. I.e. each server …

Metadata locks are used in MySQL since version 5.5.3 and are available in GA MySQL versions for 6 years already. Still they are far from clearly documented (even less their implementation is documented in details - try to find anything about metadata locks in current MySQL Internals manual) and often causes "unexpected" problems for users.

Only since MySQL 5.7.3 (and only for a few months in GA releases since 5.7.9) we have an easy, official and documented way to check metadata locks set by different sessions using the metadata_locks table in  Performance Schema. I've already explained how to use it in my blog post at Percona's blog. Still, …

I recently wrote a post on tracking metadata locks (MDL) in MySQL 5.7, and I wanted to take a moment to expand on it by explaining a couple of the associated variables in more detail.

First off, once you have enabled the performance_schema *and* the metadata lock instrumentation, you can verify it with:

mysql> SELECT * FROM performance_schema.setup_instruments
    -> WHERE NAME = 'wait/lock/metadata/sql/mdl';
+----------------------------+---------+-------+
| NAME                       | ENABLED | TIMED |
+----------------------------+---------+-------+
| wait/lock/metadata/sql/mdl | YES     | YES   |
+----------------------------+---------+-------+

“ENABLED” will report “YES” if it is enabled properly, and “NO” if not.

“TIMED” (referring to event timing) reports “YES” if it was enabled via the my.cnf or my.ini file, and it …