Thoughts on the October 2023 MySQL Releases

A few days ago, Oracle released three new MySQL GA versions: 8.2.0, 8.0.35 and 5.7.44.  I skimmed the release notes (8.2.0, 8.0.35 and 5.7.44), and I am not impressed.  I guess that I would be even less impressed / more disappointed if I had checked in greater detail, and if I had reviewed the 8.1.0, 8.0.34 and 5.7.43 release notes.  The subject of my disappointment is Oracle not fixing bugs in ALL of the LTS releases, sometimes only fixing them in the latest Innovation Release.  This post summarizes my findings and thoughts.

Rows Examined Blindspot when Looking for non-Existing Data

When trying to understand queries in the slow log, an interesting metric to look at is rows examined.  Also, when trying to understand CPU spikes on a MySQL instance, the InnoDB Metric dml_reads and the global status Innodb_rows_read are interesting to check.  In a similar way, when trying to gather information about which queries are loading the system, SUM_ROWS_EXAMINED from the Performance Schema table events_statements_summary_by_digest is interesting to analyze.  But rows examined might not mean what you think, and I give an example in this post.

TL&DR: in MySQL and from what I understand, rows examined means rows returned by the storage engine, even if the name would lead you to think that it is rows read.  A consequence of this is that a query looking for non-existing data has 0 rows examined, and this is what I call in this post a rows examined blindspot.

Avoiding a STOP SLAVE Crash with MTR in Percona Server older than 5.7.37-40

I am finalizing my Percona Live talk MySQL and Vitess (and Kubernetes) at HubSpot.  In this talk, I mentioned that I like that Percona is providing better MySQL with Percona Server.  This comes with a little inconvenience though: with improvements, sometimes comes regression.  This post is about such regression and a workaround I implemented some time ago (I should have shared it earlier).  This regression is fixed in Percona Server 5.7.37-40, so this is mostly interesting for historical purposes, or if you are running a Percona Server version older than that.

Running and Mountain Climbing at Percona Live Denver

I just booked my travel arrangements for Percona Live 2023.  In case you missed it, one of the most important MySQL Conference of the year is happening in Denver from Monday May 22 to Wednesday 24.  I will be there and I am giving a talk about how HubSpot operates Percona Server / MySQL with Vitess in Kubernetes.  My colleague, Mali Akmanalp, is also speaking about the tools we provide developers at HubSpot to keep their query workloads efficient with as little involvement from the database team as possible.  But this post is not about our talks, it is about running and mountain climbing.

Planet for the MySQL Community Graduating from Beta

In May 2020, I published a Planet for the MySQL Community Pluto Beta.  I was satisfied with the result and was considering it done, but I did not invest the time to promote it to release (a non-beta site was running for a few months without being advertised).  I finally came to it, and today I am happy to deprecate the beta and announce the release of Planet for the MySQL Community.  In this post, I recall what led to the creation of this new blog aggregator, I list recent changes, and I mention where I would like things to go in the future.  But before continuing to read this post, if you are using the beta, please update your bookmarks :

• Website : https://planet.oursqlcommunity.org/
• Feed : https://planet.oursqlcommunity.org/atom.xml

Also, if you are using Planet for the MySQL Community, could you follow Planet for the MySQL Community / @PlanetMysqlComT on Twitter.  This allows me to know my users and to gauge the interest for this work.