In one of my previous posts I stated that in Oracle's MySQL server some old enough features remain half-backed, not well tested, not properly integrated with each other, and not documented properly. It's time to prove this statement.

I should highlight from the very beginning that most of the features I am going to list are not that much improved by other vendors. But they at least have an option of providing other, fully supported storage engines that may overcome the problems in these features, while Oracle's trend to get rid of most engines but InnoDB makes MySQL users more seriously affected by any problems related to InnoDB.

I am completing my preparations for the upcoming FOSDEM talk, and one of last things I wanted to do in frames of them is a quick review of known bugs and problems in current (as in MySQL 5.7 GA) implementation of so called "online" DDL for InnoDB tables.

In my previous post I already shared my view on another important InnoDB feature, persistent statistics. Unlike that, I do not really hate online DDL. I just try to avoid it if possible and use tools like pt-online-schema-change or gh-ost instead. Not because it is not documented properly (the …

New Year (that starts on Monday!) gives a good opportunity to change something in our lives, start doing something new, better or different. Let's assume I failed with all these so far, as I am again posting about MySQL bugs here.

Since my previous post on this topic I've subscribed to 15 more MySQL bugs, and being on a combination of public holidays and vacation now gives me a good opportunity to review these bug reports.

Here they are, starting from the most recent:

• Bug #89065 - "sync_binlog=1 on a busy server and slow binary log filesystem stalls slaves". I do not remember seeing multiple threads in "Finished reading one binlog; switching to next binlog" state, but it would be …

While working in Support, I noticed that probably at least once a week I have to use or mention lsof utility in some context. This week, for example, we had a customer trying to find out if his mysqld process running is linked with tcmalloc library. He started it different ways, using LD_PRELOAD directly and --malloc-lib option of mysqld_safe script etc, but wanted to verify that his attempts really worked as expected. My immediate comment in the internal chat was: "Just let them run lsof -p `pidof mysqld` | grep mall and check!" My MariaDB 10.2 instance uses jemalloc and this can be checked exactly the same way:
openxs@ao756:~/dbs/maria10.2$ ps aux | grep mysqld...
openxs    4619  0.0  0.0   4452   804 pts/2    S    …

This week I noticed (yet another) customer issue related to the output produced by mysqladmin debug command (or when mysqld process gets SIGHUP signal). I mean the output generated by the mysql_print_status() function. In this issue the content of the output was misinterpreted. I've seen this in the past more than once, and requested to document the output properly, but it never happened for a reason that there is an internal feature request to put this information elsewhere, in Performance Schema or Information Schema. The bug ended up with "Won't fix" status.

Surely I complained in a comment and on Facebook, and then …

The original idea of this series was to publish one post per week, but it seems every other week I have some special topic that well deserves a dedicated post. Last week I had no time to complete my writing because of long (and, I hope, useful) Howto post on replacing corrupted partition using non-corrupted one from other server in replication setup. But I had links and notes collected in a draft that I am going to complete now.

First of all, during the previous week I had time to submit two more talks for the  …

Oracle released MySQL 5.7.15 recently, earlier than expected. The reason for this "unexpected" release is not clear to me, but it could happen because of a couple of security related internal bug reports that got fixed:

• "It was possible to write log files ending with .ini or .cnf that later could be parsed as option files. The general query log and slow query log can no longer be written to a file ending with .ini or .cnf. (Bug #24388753)
• Privilege escalation was possible by exploiting the way REPAIR TABLE used temporary files. (Bug #24388746)"

Let me concentrate on the most important fixes to bugs and problems reported by Community users. …

For some reason I do not see numerous public announcements about recent MySQL 5.7.13 release, even though it happened a couple of days ago formally. Maybe that's because we do not have any really "big" new features in this release (new ->> operator for introduced though for those who, unlike me, care about JSON). Still there are many fixes for bugs previously reported by Community (or Oracle engineers, but still in public bugs database), and I'd like to discuss some of them.

Let me start with the bug that was NOT fixed though, Bug #81093, "mysqld_multi not included in mysql-community-server package", reported by Georgi Iovchev and …

This Log Buffer Edition gathers a wide sample of blogs and then purifies the best ones from Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Oracle:

• If you take a look at the “alter user” command in the old 9i documentation, you’ll see this: DEFAULT ROLE Clause.
• There’s been an interesting recent discussion on the OTN Database forum regarding “Index blank blocks after a large update that was rolled back.”
• 12c Parallel Execution New Features: 1 SLAVE distribution
• Index Tree Dumps in Oracle 12c …

The ALTER TABLE statement syntax is explained in the manual at:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/alter-table.html

To put it simply, there are two ways you can alter the table to use a new character set.

1. ALTER TABLE tablename DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

This will alter the table to use the new character set as the default, but as a safety mechanism, it will only change the table definition for the default character set. That is, existing character fields will have the old character set per column. For example:

mysql> create table mybig5 (id int not null auto_increment primary key,      
    -> subject varchar(100) ) engine=innodb default charset big5;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.81 sec)

mysql> show create table …