I know, what, MyISAM-only? Yes, it’s true, and it occurs more than you might think.

If you do run MyISAM-only, it’s common to have disabled InnoDB altogether (–skip-innodb) to avoid allocating any RAM to it, and to avoid unnecessary files required for backups, and so forth. (See this post if interested in disabling InnoDB in MySQL 5.6 and/or MariaDB 10.0.)

One improvement in MySQL 5.6 and MariaDB 10.0 is the addition of some system tables. The 2 that are in both are `innodb_table_stats` and `innodb_index_stats`, both of which have an engine type of InnoDB. (The 1 additional system table in MariaDB 10.0 is `gtid_slave_pos`, and the 3 additional system tables in MySQL 5.6 are `slave_master_info`, `slave_relay_log_info`, and `slave_worker_info`.)

The issue, with regards to running MyISAM-only, is that these new …

We’re always testing the latest versions of MySQL with most of the environments to make sure that we can find the critical issues before it goes to production. This wasn’t different with the 5.6 MySQL neither. We already started to play with this version in the summer. The first news were very promising. The performance gain is significant. However we have run into couple of errors. One of them was the

mysql_install_db problem with replicating environment

[root@hostname ~]# mysql_install_db --user=mysql --datadir=/mysql/data/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Installing MySQL system tables...
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO
121217 10:02:20 InnoDB: CPU supports crc32 instructions
121217 10:02:20 …