Fun with Bugs #26 - MySQL bugs Oracle had not fixed for me (yet)

In the previous post in this series I've listed 15 MySQL bug reports, documentation and feature requests I've made in 2013 that got fixes or any other kind of solution. Now it's time to check what happened to the rest and try to think why.

First of all, no MySQL bug reporter is perfect (if only Domas), so some bug reports may be false alarms ("Not a bug"), to hard to fix at any foreseeable future ("To be fixed later") or asking for something that Oracle does not plan to provide at all ("Won't fix" or "Unsupported"). Some of my bug reports this year felt into these categories:

• Bug #71205 - "Queries to P_S seems to pass extra stages related to query cache". This is "Not a bug", as it seems access to query cache happens even before SELECT is parsed enough to find out it accesses table(s) in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA. So, if you want to avoid extra overhead in general case make sure you start all your queries to PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA with SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE ... I'd prefer to see this explicitly mentioned in the manual, but maybe it's only me.   
• Bug #71170 - "Please, make MySQL RPMs relocatable". This one was set to "Unsupported", so Oracle does not plan to provide relocatable packages and users who want to test/use multiple versions of MySQL server should either rely on chroot environments, .tar.gz packages and sandboxes or wait for other MySQL providers to make their RPMs relocatable (if ever). Fair enough.
• Bug #71041 - "Please, document every instrument in P_S.setup_instruments in details". Here I see "To be fixed later", so it seems documentation team has more important things to do than to document all the details of PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA instrumentation. This is sad as it's hard to use instrumentation now without knowing all ins and outs of the code. I am also not satisfied with official reasons to have this undocumented listed in the manual.
• Bug #69399 - "Inconsistency in crash report". It's "Won't fix" and for a really good reason explained by Shane. Signal handler must use approved safe functions or risk causing a crash itself. time() is safe but returns UTC. So, you should expect that for crashes, assertion failures and outputs caused by other signals you get timestamps in UTC, no matter what your timezone is. So, this was my fault.

Some bug reports are still not processed ("Open" or "Analyzing"). That's expected for complex reports, those without clearly repeatable test case (I try to NOT send reports like this) or related to not clearly documented features of MySQL server. But I have one feature request that is probably just missed. It's the Bug #70196 - "DISCARD/IMPORT tablespace is not supported for partitioned InnoDB tables". There is no way to IMPORT just one partition, or, for that matter, to backup or restore from backup only one partition, even when it is stored in the individual .ibd. file and you use advanced tools like MySQL Enterprise Backup for backups. This is unfortunate that nobody explicitly cares about this.

The rest of my reports sent this year were accepted as valid and has "Verified" status. One can hardly expect for 20+ valid MySQL server or documentation bugs he reported to be fixed over a year, so this situation is not a problem. But I still would like to remind about a couple of reports that are verified long time ago and still do not get any visible attention or fixes:

• Bug #68097 - "Manual does not explain that some P_S instruments must be enabled at startup". it was reported on January 16, 2013 and it seems already clear what instruments (mutexes actually) must be enabled upon startup (and then can be disabled and enabled back dynamically at runtime), by design. Slide 35 of my presentation for Percona Live London 2013 quotes the explanation made by famous Oracle's performance expert, Dimitri Kravtchuk, in his blog. But the documentation request is still just "Verified".
• Bug #69574 - "Slave crashes when applying row-based binlog entries in cascading replication...". It affects MySQL 5.6, was verified 6 months ago, sounds serious enough and still had not got any single comment after verification.

For other bug reports I agree to wait patiently... Just note that while I like to play with PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA or find some minor problems in the manual just for fun, most of my bug reports for InnoDB, Optimizer, Partitioning and Replication categories are based on real life issues noted by Percona customers. They were not really funny to hit in production and caused notable problems.