This comes from an issue that I worked on recently, wherein a customer reported that their application was working fine under stock MySQL 5.6 but producing erroneous results when they tried running it on Amazon RDS 5.6. They had a table which, on the working server, contained two TIMESTAMP columns, one which defaulted to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and the other which defaulted to ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′, like so:

CREATE TABLE mysql56 (
  id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  ts1 TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  ts2 TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
);

However, under Amazon RDS, the same table looked like this:

CREATE TABLE rds56 ( 
  id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  ts1 TIMESTAMP NULL DEFAULT NULL,
  ts2 TIMESTAMP NULL DEFAULT NULL, 
);

They mentioned that their schema contains TIMESTAMP column definitions without any modifiers for nullability or …

Whither your rollback plan?

MySQL 5.6 upgrades are in full swing these days and knowing how to safely upgrade from MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 is important. When upgrading a replication environment, it’s important that you can build a migration plan that safely allows for your upgrade with minimal risk — rollback is often a very important component to this.

For many people this means upgrading slaves first and then the master.  The strategy of an older master replicating to a newer slave is well known and has been supported in MySQL replication for a very long time.  To be specific:  you can have a MySQL 5.6 slave of a 5.5 master and this should work fine until you upgrade your master and/or promote one of the slaves to be the master.

However, there are those of us who like to live on the edge and do …