While doing some testing (that I published later here) on the still-in-development MySQL 5.7 I wanted to do some analysis on the configuration to see if the changes in performance were due to the code changes or just to the new MySQL defaults (something that is very common in the migration from 5.5 to 5.6 due to the default transaction log size and other InnoDB parameters). This is a quick post aiming to identify the global variables changed between these two versions.

You could tell me that you could just read the release notes, but my experience (and this is not an exception, as you will see) …

Today’s trivial MySQL system variable:

old_alter_table

The interesting bit is that this is a system variable, and shows up in SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES, but is not documented on the Server System Variables manual page.

Instead, it is documented on the manual page for Server options.

Unfortunately, that documentation is very sparse. It tells us:

old-alter-table is an option that can be set in an option file (such as /etc/my.cnf)

old_alter_table is the name of the variable.

And….that’s it. It is neither a system nor status variable, there is no scope, and no entry for whether or not it is dynamic. These last 2 are baffling, though they show up in other variables in the …