MySQL Support Engineer's Chronicles, Issue #8

This week is special and full of anniversaries for me. This week 5 years ago I left Oracle behind and joined Percona... Same week 5 years ago I had written something about MySQL in this blog for the first time in my life. 5 years ago I've created my Facebook account that I actively (ab)use for discussing work-related issues. So, to summarize, it's a five years anniversary of my coming out as a MySQL Entomologist, somebody who writes and speaks about MySQL and bugs in MySQL in public! These 5 years were mostly awesome.

I decided to celebrate with yet another post in this relatively new series and summarize in short what interesting things I studied, noticed or had to work on this week while providing support to customers of all kinds of MySQL.

This week started for me with the need to find out why mariabackup fails on Windows, for one of customers. If you missed it, MariaDB created a tool for online backup based on Percona's XtraBackup that supports few additional features (like data at rest encryption of MariaDB Server) and works on Windows as well, included it into MariaDB server and even declared it "Stable" as of MariaDB 10.1.26. In the process of working on that problem I had to use procmon tool, based on this KB article. The root cause of the problem was NTFS compression used for the target directory (see MDEV-13691 by Vladislav Vaintroub , who forces lazy me to improve my rudimentary Windows user skills from time to time, for some related details). So, better do not use NTFS compression of the backup destination if you need to back up big enough (50G+) tables. I really enjoyed working with procmon that helped to find out what could cause (somewhat random) "error 22" failures.

I was (positively) surprised to find out there there is a MariaDB KB article on such a specific topic as troubleshooting on Windows. Besides this one, I had to use the following KB articles while working with customers this week:

• ColumnStore Bulk Data Loading
• Block-Based Join Algorithms

and found something new (for me) there. I never cared to find out what join_cache_level is used for previously, for example.

Besides mariabackup, this week I had to discuss various problems related to backing up TokuDB tables, so you should expect my blog posts related to this topic soon.

My colleague Geoff Montee published a useful post this week, "Automatically Dropping Old Partitions in MySQL and MariaDB". Make sure to check comments and his followup. Geoff had also reported nice Bug #87589 - "Documentation incorrectly states that LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE does not use tmpdir", that is still "Open" for some reason.

During such a great week I had to report some MySQL bug, so I did it. Check Bug #87624 - "Wrong statement-based binary logging for CONCAT() in stored procedure". I've seen all these "Illegal mix of collations..." way too often over years.

Other bugs that attracted my attention were:

• Bug #84108 - "Mysql 5.7.14 hangs and kills itself during drop database statement". This bug should probably become "Open" and properly processed, as current "Duplicate" status is questionable, at best. Arjen Lentz attracted mine (and not only mine) attention to this old enough and improperly handled bug report.
• Bug #87619 - "InnoDB partition table will lock into the near record as a condition in the use". Nice to see this regression bug "Verified" after all. It seems native partitioning in MySQL 5.7 came with some cost of extra/different locking.

Time to stop writing and prepare for further celebrations, fun and anniversaries. Stay tuned!