I noticed that in the latest release of Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), the behavior of wsrep_RSU_method changed somewhat.  Prior to this release, the variable was GLOBAL only, meaning to use it you would:

mysql> set GLOBAL wsrep_RSU_method='RSU';
mysql> ALTER TABLE ...
mysql> set GLOBAL wsrep_RSU_method='TOI';

This had the (possibly negative) side-effect that ALL DDL’s issued on this node would be affected by the setting while in RSU mode.

So, in this latest release, this variable was made to also have a SESSION value, while retaining GLOBAL as well. This has a couple of side-effects that are common to MySQL variables that are both GLOBAL and SESSION:

• The SESSION copy is made from whatever the GLOBAL’s value is when a new connection (session) is …