Fun with Bugs #96 - On MySQL Bug Reports I am Subscribed to, Part XXX

My weekdays are still busy even during this lockdown period, but weekend is a perfect time for yet another blog post about MySQL bugs I considered interesting. Very few followers read my posts on other topics anyway, especially if they have the "M....DB" word...

So, here is a new list of optimizer, replication, InnoDB and few other bugs in GA versions of MySQL that I've subscribed to since the end of February, 2020:

• Bug #98675 - "LIMIT clause in derived table garbles EXPLAIN Note". It's not a big deal and in specific case presented by Øystein Grøvlen optimizer works properly (note text aside), but some clarifications to the note and/or documentation would still help. Comments are useful to read and shows a great example of proper cooperation from Oracle side.
• Bug #98719 - "Parallel CREATE TABLE statement binlogged in a wrong order". This bug report from Song Libing shows that Oracle engineers readily accept and verify bug reports where some code modification (adding debug sync point, for example) is needed to demonstrate the problem with a repeatable, deterministic test case. I've seen other bug reports where code modification was considered a problem and bug was not verified immediately as a result. Note that this bug seem to be not repeatable on MySQL 8.0.19 and this was explicitly tested, with test results shared in public. Good job, Umesh Shastry!
• Bug #98734 - "Same digest for different queries if we use integer value in ORDER BY caluse". Different column numbers in ORDER BY often cause totally different execution plans, so assuming these queries are the same ("ORDER BY ?") for the purpose of digesting is misleading. Moreover, as noted by Lalit Choudhary from Percona, with column names instead of numbers such queries are not considered the same, so Performance Schema has to be more consistent.
• Bug #98739 - "TempTable storage engine slow if mmap is required". Take care when large temporary tables are used for your queries in MySQL 8.0.x. By default (without temptable_use_mmap = OFF) when the table is larger than temptable_max_ram you may notice a very slow query execution. Nice finding by Marcelo Altmann. This is not the only related performance regression I've seen reported recently. Looks like TempTable storage engine problems is a real main topic of this post!
• Bug #98750 - "SHOW FIELDS command regression on MySQL 8.0". This performance regression bug was reported by Juan Arruti. See also similar Bug #92195 - "checking permissions 90 time" that was wrongly(!) declared "Not a bug" back in 2018 just because of the way the problem was demonstrated. This time Przemyslaw Malkowski helped to make the point based on Performance Schema instrumentation, so there was no other option but to accept this as a real performance regression bug. Take care if you use SHOW statements with MySQL 8!
• Bug #98782 - "Using TempTable engine for GROUP BY is slower than using MEMORY engine". In this bug report Øystein Grøvlen demonstrated that MEMORY engine is about 10% faster for temporary tables in MySQL 8. Make sure to use internal_tmp_mem_storage_engine=MEMORY if you care about performance.
• Bug #98869 - "Temp ibt tablespace truncation at disconnection stuck InnoDB under large BP". Bug reporter, Fungo Wang, used different methods to show the performance impact of the regression probably introduced by WL#11613. From pt-pmp to perf and other OS level tools. Make sure to check all comments that point out to other bugs and problems.
• Bug #98974 - "InnoDB temp table could hurt InnoDB perf badly". Yet another bug report by Fungo Wang. This time it took a lot of time and efforts from the bug reporter and many MySQL Community members (including me) to get this bug properly processed, even though it started with a detailed source code analysis, properly described test case, stack traces analysis and perf profiling details shared. The ideal bug report got far from ideal treatment, unfortunately.
• Bug #98976 - "Case of referenced column of foreign key not corrected on import". Tim Düsterhus found that in versions with the fix for Bug #88718 - "Foreign key is always in lower case" the case is not always correct in the output of subsequent mysqldump.
• Bug #98980 - "A state inside mysql_real_connect_nonblocking still blocks". This bug report by Jay Edgar was verified surprisingly fast. This is why it ended up in my list.
• Bug #98990 - "avg_count_reset for monitor set owner is always NULL in I_S.INNODB_METRICS ". In this case Fungo Wang had not only found a bug, but also provided a patch that was accepted by Oracle after signing the OCA.
• Bug #99006 - "GTID Synchronisation speed when doing START SLAVE". Simon Mudd noted that in some cases with GTIDs START SLAVE may take a lot of time:
  

  root@myhost [(none)]> start slave;
  Query OK, 0 rows affected (3 min 17.74 sec)

  and what's worse nothing is logged to the error log in the process to show the reason, progress or anything useful. Probably it's expected that with many binary logs finding proper GTID in them takes time, but some feedback would be useful. The bug does not have any clear public test case and is still under analysis.
• Bug #99010 - "The mtr case --send command not use ps-protocol when run with --ps-protocol ". Does not sound like a big deal for anyone but developers who write MTR test cases, but in this report Ze Yang had provided source code analysis and quite detailed how to repeat steps and still got useless requests for additional feedback and nothing else till today. This is, again, unfortunate.
• Bug #99039 - "PSI thread info not getting updated after statement execution". Who could imagine that regression bugs may be introduced even into Performance Schema? But Pranay Motupalli found one introduced into 8.0.18, 5.7.28+ and 5.6.47+ by this commit! I hope to see it fixed soon.
• Bug #99051 - "XA commit may do engine commit before MYSQL_BIN_LOG::ordered_commit". XA transactions is one of my favorite weak areas of MySQL. In this bug report Dennis GAO described a case when XA COMMIT operation may do a engine commit before binlog flush on Ubuntu 18.04. He had contributed the fix based on the assumption that the best way is to ensure the sequence in the plugin_hash, so that the binlog plugin should be always before all the transnational engine plugins. I only hope that one day a long list of XA bugs will be fixed in one of forks if not in MySQL itself.

This is my favorite point of view this year.

To summarize:

1. I see some really good examples of bugs verification by Oracle engineers recently. All supported versions are tested, nobody tries to argue against the bug reporter approach used to demonstrate the problem, even if it includes source code modifications. Looks really promising.
2. Even ideal bug reports sometimes are not processed properly without extra efforts from MySQL Community, unfortunately.
3. Percona engineers still contribute a lot to MySQL with both new bug reports and useful comments and clarifications. I hope Oracle appreciates that.
4. Looks like code review and regression testing in Oracle still may benefit from some improvements, as we still see new regression bugs...