Fun with Bugs #12 - MySQL Cluster 7.3 GA

I had always tried to avoid all kinds of clusters, from Oracle RAC to MySQL NDB Cluster and Percona XtraDB Cluster, as much as possible. But these days clusters become common and it seems new developments in this area can not be just ignored. So, I decided to devote this issue of "Fun with Bugs" to MySQL Cluster 7.3, that was released as GA this week and still is in the news.

The release was mostly about adding foreign keys support (one of the features that some users were missing for years comparing to InnoDB and other cluster database solutions). At the same time, MySQL Cluster is now based on MySQL Server 5.6 code. I've decided to quickly check how community adopted 7.3 and what it means in terms of bug reports.

If one would just search for active bugs in version "7.3" at the public bugs database using its own advanced search form, she would find only 8 bugs, of them only the following are recent and/or seems serious:

• Bug #69528 - ORDER BY with JOIN may produce wrong results in 7.3.2. This is probably related to one of optimizer regression bugs in MySQL 5.6 (check previous issue for some of them) and is not specific to NDB storage engine, but still may become a regression that one can easily hit.
• Bug #69510 - LIKE just does not work as expected with NDB tables. This is really weird, if you ask me, to see this bug in new GA release. Read that report to check what others think... It seems a well known old problem, probably with a known solution, that somehow ends up not fixed in too many MySL Cluster releases. When I ask what's going on with MySQL QA these days it's exactly this kind of bugs that makes me worry about it, no matter how much Oracle really invests into the process. It seems that some procedures are just not there or still not followed.
• One of the new features of MySQL Cluster 7.3 is "NoSQL JavaScript Connector for Node.js". Unfortunately it is not bug free, check Bug #69509. Good that it's al;ready work in progress and was reported by Oracle MySQL engineer in public bugs database. It shows that engineers care, still, if not to prevent the bug then to inform about it as soon as it is found.

Other bug reports are either old enough or not of wide importance. There are minor problems with installer on Windows (check Bug #69120 and Bug #69112 from Shane), ndbd does not report failure status when it runs as Windows service (check Bug #69063). Problems with table names case (non-) sensitivity on Windows, that used to hit InnoDB, seems to be reported many months ago for new MySQL Cluster foreign key feature (check Bug #67354), and it is still not clear if anybody is going to do anything about it. That's all "Verified" bugs for now in 7.3.

Does it mean that MySQL Cluster 7.3 GA is nearly bug free and safe to upgrade to? Unfortunately no, and the reason (besides 3 bugs above) is simple: it is based in MySQL 5.6, moreover, 5.6.11 at the moment, so you should expect to see dozens of bugs that are still not fixed in MySQL 5.6. So, it's time to test this release for sure, and it's time to check active bugs in MySQL 5.6, but, IMHO, hardly it's time to think that upgrade to MySQL Cluster 7.3 may be seamless and not prune to regressions.