MySQL 5.5.38 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.5, is GA), and is available for download here:

http://downloads.skysql.com/archive/index/p/mysql/v/5.5.38

This release, similar to the last 5.5 release, is mostly uneventful.

Out of the mere 13 bugs, most were benign, but I thought there were two worth mentioning (just because one is a slight performance improvement for InnoDB, and the other relates to slave consistency, so always important to see if it could affect you):

1. InnoDB: For each insert, memset would be called three times to allocate memory for system fields. To reduce CPU usage, the three memset calls are now combined into a single call. (Bug #17858679, Bug #71014)
2. Replication: When …

MySQL 5.5.37 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.5, is GA), and is available for download here:

http://downloads.skysql.com/archive/index/p/mysql/v/5.5.37

This release, similar to the last 5.5 release, is mostly uneventful.

There was one new feature added (Solaris-specific + obscure), and only 21 bugs fixed.

The new feature is this:

• On Solaris, mysql_config –libs now includes -R/path/to/library so that libraries can be found at runtime.

Out of the 21 bugs, most were benign, but there was one definitely worth mentioning (because it is a regression bug with performance degradation):

• A regression introduced by Bug #14329288 would result in a performance degradation when a compressed table does not fit into memory. (Bug #18124788, …

MySQL 5.5.36 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.5, is GA), and is available for download here:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.5.html

I was reading through the changelogs to review the changes and fixes, and to summarize, I must say this release is mostly uneventful.

There was one new feature added (for building, so not really applicable to everyone), and only 17 bugs fixed.

The new feature is this:

• CMake now supports a -DTMPDIR=dir_name option to specify the default tmpdir value. If unspecified, the value defaults to P_tmpdir in . Thanks to Honza Horak for the patch. (Bug #68338, Bug #16316074)

Out of the 17 bugs, there was only 1 I thought worth mentioning (because it is a wrong results bug):

• COUNT(DISTINCT) sometimes produced an incorrect result when the last read row …

Oracle has released the Critical Patch Update (CPU) advisory for January 2014.

The affected MySQL products are:

• Oracle MySQL Enterprise Monitor, versions 2.3, 3.0 

• Oracle MySQL Server, versions 5.1, 5.5, 5.6

So this means that you should consider updating MySQL. For MySQL Enterprise the updates should be available on My Oracle Support and for the Community version the new versions are on the regular download locations. I guess the official repositories are already updated.

For MySQL 5.6 you should upgrade to 5.6.15
For MySQL 5.5 you should upgrade to 5.5.35
For MySQL 5.1 you should upgrade to 5.1.73

If you use the MySQL release from your distribution …

A fairy tale

Once upon a time I did an operating system upgrade, a minor one that should do no harm, but just get me up to date by fixing any bugs in the version I had been using. It seemed like a good idea.

All seemed to be fine. I use a package provided by an external vendor and not the one produced by the operating system provider as this vendor provides a newer version of the package and I need that. The vendor has to make his package fit in the os environment his package is built for and normally does a pretty good job.

I use automation to build my systems and when I built a new one some issues appeared. Related to the new version of the OS the provider had enhanced one of his packages and the installation pulled in new dependencies. The install of the external package I use then broke as it conflicted with the new dependency provided by the OS.  While a workaround is possible: uninstall …

A few years ago, I asked to check with me in the long (very long) change history of MySQL 5.5 documentation what are the changes in relation to the SQL syntax.
Chris Calender helped me to retrieve a list of the main changes, thanks again Chris.

Today, I would like to share this list with you.
It is simply a curated transcript of what you might find in the documentation but I’m sure it can help some of you.
 

INTO clause in nested SELECT statements

 
Previously, the parser accepted an INTO clause in nested SELECT statements, which is invalid because such statements must return their results to the outer context. As of MySQL 5.5.3, this syntax is no longer permitted and statements that use it must be changed.
 

Table aliases in DELETE statements

 
In MySQL 5.5.3, several changes …

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 & the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this.

I wasn’t going to focus on the performance of individual queries in this post, but instead intended to focus only on the overall response time for answering all of the queries in the benchmark. I got some strange results, however, which showed MySQL 5.6.10 to be much slower than MySQL 5.5.30 even with only a single connection. I felt these results warranted deeper investigation, so I did some research and …

MySQL 5.5 lock_wait_timeout: patience is a virtue, and a locked server

Like Ovais said in Implications of Metadata Locking Changes in MySQL 5.5, the hot topic these days is MySQL 5.6, but there was an important metadata locking change in MySQL 5.5.  As I began to dig into the Percona Toolkit bug he reported concerning this change apropos pt-online-schema-change, I discovered something about lock_wait_timeout …

While most of the talk recently has mostly been around the new changes in MySQL 5.6 (and that is understandable), I have had lately some very interesting cases to deal with, with respect to the Metadata Locking related changes that were introduced in MySQL 5.5.3. It appears that the implications of Metadata Locking have not been covered well, and since there are still a large number of MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 installations that would upgrade or are in the process of upgrading to MySQL 5.5, I thought it necessary to discuss what these implications exactly are.

The post Implications of Metadata Locking Changes in MySQL 5.5 appeared first on ovais.tariq.

Ubuntu does not provide an apt-get repository package for MySQL 5.5 on this older OS, however this is still a widely used long term support version. The following steps will upgrade an existing MySQL 5.1 apt-get version to a standard MySQL 5.5 binary.

Step 1. Remove existing MySQL 5.1 retaining data and configuration

sudo su -
service mysql stop
cp -r /etc/mysql /etc/mysql.51
cp -r /var/lib/mysql /var/lib/mysql.51
which mysqld
dpkg -P mysql-server mysql-server-5.1 mysql-server-core-5.1
which mysqld
which mysql
dpkg -P mysql-client-5.1 mysql-client-core-5.1
which mysql
dpkg -P libdbd-mysql-perl libmysqlclient16 mysql-common
# This will not remove /etc/mysql if any other files are in the directory
dpkg -l | grep mysql
[ -d /etc/mysql ] && mv /etc/mysql /etc/mysql.uninstall
cp -r /etc/mysql.51 /etc/mysql

2. Prepare configuration and required directories.

sudo su -
MYCNF="/etc/mysql/my.cnf"
grep basedir ${MYCNF}
sed -ie …