Fun with Bugs #79 - On MySQL Bug Reports I am Subscribed to, Part XV

More than 3 weeks passed since my previous review of public MySQL bug reports I am subscribed to, so it's time to present some of the bugs I've considered interesting in January, 2019.

As usual, I'll review them starting from the oldest and try to summarize my feelings about these bugs at the end of this post. Here they are:

• Bug #93806 - "Document error about ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE". Years pass, but fine MySQL manual still does not explain some cases of InnoDB locking properly. Xiaobin Lin found yet another case that it does not explain properly. Or, maybe, the manual is correct and the problem in the implementation? MariaDB 10.3.7 shows the same behavior.
• Bug #93827 - "dict_index_has_desc() is not efficient". Yet another bug report from Zhai Weixiang. I see 50 still active bug reports from him! Maybe Oracle should send some nice T-shirts to top N most productive bug reporters?
• Bug #93845 - "Optimizer choose wrong index, sorting index instead of filtering index". yet another bug report of a known class, this time from Daniele Renda. It's good example of optimizer trace usage to make a point. Note also that using ANALYZE ... UPDATE HISTOGRAMS does not help. As a side note, implementation of optimizer trace for MariaDB is finally in progress and should be done for upcoming 10.4. See MDEV-6111 for the details if you care.
• Bug #93875 - "mysqldump per-table dump is slow since 5.7 on instances with many tables". This performance regression bug (that was "verified" without adding the regression tag) was reported by Nikolai Ikhalainen from Percona. This bug report is a nice example of using Docker to create easily repeatable test cases for bug reports.
• Bug #93878 - "innodb_status_output fails to restore to old value". This great bug report from Yuhui Wang  not only describes 3 cases when InnoDB status is printed to the error log automatically, but also shows that in one of these cases, when we can not found free block in the buffer pool in 20 loops, this printing is not stopped after the problem is resolved, and provides a patch that resolves the problem. See also his nice Bug #94065 - "MySQL fails to startup when setting persist variable" with detailed analysis of the problem.
• Bug #93917 - "Wrong binlog entry for BLOB on a blackhole intermediary master". Nice corner case was found by Sveta Smirnova from Percona. With her 52 "Verified" bug reports at the moment she also deserves a T-shirt from Oracle as one of top bug reporters!
• Bug #93922 - "UNION ALL very slow with SUM(0)". This weird bug was found and reported by Sergio Paternoster. He had to spend notable efforts to see this bug "Verified"...
• Bug #93948 - "XID inconsistency on master-slave with CTAS". Krunal Bauskar from Percona noted this inconsistency in XID generation on slave vs master. Let's wait and check if it ends up as "Not a bug".
• Bug #93957 - "slave_compressed_protocol doesn't work with semi-sync replication in MySQL-5.7". This bug report from Pavel Katiushyn also looks like a regression, as similar bug was fixed in older 5.7.x release. But I do not see any public comment with verification attempt neither in recent 5.7, nor in recent 8.0 (where older bug also had to be fixed). So, the bug is "verified", but the real impact and versions affected are not clear.
• Bug #93963 - "Slow query log doesn't log a slow CREATE INDEX with admin statements enabled". This clear and properly tagged regression vs MySQL 5.7 was reported by Jeremy Smyth.
• Bug #93986 - "Transactions in serializable mode are not actually serializable". I've subscribed to this bug report mostly for (expected) fun of reading further comments. It's still "Need feedback", but single comment so far is worth reading.
• Bug #94121 - "Enable hardware CRC32 under Valgrind". Laurynas Biveinis from Percona also provided a patch for this 8 years old problem.
• Bug #94130 - "XA COMMIT may lead replication broken". Yet another proof that XA transactions implementation is broken in MySQL. This time from Phoenix Zhang and in semi-sync replication case.

This photo reminds me current state of MySQL bugs processing in Oracle - it seems there is no clear and straightforward way to follow. Everything is fuzzy these days...

There are few more bugs reported in January, 2019 that I am watching, but their status is not yet clearly defined, so I decided to skip them in this review.

To summarize:

1.  Oracle engineers who process bugs still do not add regression tag to many regression bugs. This is a shame, really. If I were their boss I'd make this a policy and one of important KPI values to monitor.
2. In some cases bugs get verified immediately without any demonstrated attempt to show how the check was performed, while in other cases poor bug reporters have to fight hard to re-make their point and get a real check done. It seems these days good old approaches to bugs verification are not followed strictly by some Oracle engineers.