“Hey, what’s going on with my applications? I installed a newer version of MySQL. I have queries that perfectly run with the older version and now I have a lot of errors.”

This is a question some customers have asked me after upgrading MySQL. In this article, we’ll see what one of the most frequent causes of this issue is, and how to solve it.

We are talking about this error:

ERROR 1055 (42000): Expression #2 of SELECT list is not in GROUP BY clause 
and contains nonaggregated column 'test.web_log.user_id' which is not functionally 
dependent on columns in GROUP BY clause; this is incompatible 
with sql_mode=only_full_group_by

Have you ever seen it?

SQL_MODE

As the first thing let me introduce the concept of SQL_MODE.

MySQL can work using different SQL modes that affect the syntax of the queries and validation checks. Based on the configured value of the …

New MySQL version, YAY!

MySQL 5.7 is full of new features, like virtual columns, virtual indexes and JSON fields! But, it came with some changes to the default configuration. When running:

SELECT @@GLOBAL.sql_mode;

We get:

ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

What I want to talk about is the ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY mode. This mode rejects queries where nonaggregated columns are expected, but aren’t on the GROUP BY or HAVING clause. Before MySQL 5.7.5, ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY was disabled by default, now it is enabled.

You know the drill…

This is a simple statement, people use it everywhere, it shouldn’t be that hard to use, right?

Given the following schema:

Suppose I want to list all users that commented on …

MySQL is a database that has been bending the SQL standard in ways that make it hard to move off MySQL. What may appear to be a clever technique for vendor lockin (or maybe just oversight of the standard) can be quite annoying in understanding the real meaning of the SQL language. One such example … Continue reading Use MySQL’s Strict Mode on all new Projects! →

Friend and former colleague Roland Bouwman has written an excellent update on the GROUP BY implementation in MySQL.

MySQL’s implementation of GROUP BY has historically been quirky. Sometimes that quirkiness has been useful, but often it causes grief as SQL authors can make mistakes that are executed but don’t produce the results they want (or expect).

Simple example:

SELECT cat, COUNT(val) as cnt, othercol FROM tbl GROUP BY cat

The ‘cat‘ column is in the GROUP BY clause, the COUNT(val) is an aggregate, but the ‘othercol‘ column is … well… neither. What used to effectively happen is that the server would pick one othercol value from within each group. As I noted before, sometimes useful but often a pest as the server wouldn’t know if …

Today, Oracle announced the availability of the Development Milestone Release 15 of MySQL 5.7.5. The tagline for this release promises "Enhanced Database Performance and Manageability". That may sound rather generic, the actual list of changes and improvements is simply *huge*, and includes many items that I personally find rather exciting! Perhaps I'm mistaken but I think this may be one of the largest number of changes packed into a MySQL point release that I've witnessed in a long time. The list of changes includes improvements such as:

• InnoDB improvements: Simplified tablespace recovery, support for spatial indexes, dynamic configuration …