The temporal datatypes ‘TIME/DATETIME/TIMESTAMP’ supports
fractional values starting from MySQL 5.6.4 version. Hence the
storage requirement and encoding differs in comparison to pre-
MySQL 5.6.4 temporal datatypes.
As mentioned in the section ‘Upgrading from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6′,
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html
Once you have imported the pre-MySQL 5.6.4 tables, ‘ALTER TABLE’
allows creation of tables containing temporal columns of both
mysql-5.5 and mysql-5.6 format.
As noted in the documentation, the disadvantages of having such
tables are:
- Recreating tables having both 5.5 and 5.6 temporals becomes
tedious process when the metadata file(.frm) for the table is
unavailable. This would involve recreating the table having the
old temporal columns using 5.5 server instance and then adding
the 5.6 temporal columns using 5.6 server instance.
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