Showing posts with label MTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MTS. Show all posts

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Fun with Bugs #92 - On MySQL Bug Reports I am Subscribed to, Part XXVI

I'd like to continue reviewing MySQL bug reports from Community users that I considered interesting and subscribed to. Unlike in the previous post in this series, I am not going to check test cases on any competitor product, but will use only recently released MySQL 5.7.29 and 8.0.19 for checks, if any. This time I'll concentrate on bugs reported in November 2019.

As usual, I mostly care about optimizer, InnoDB and replication related bugs. Here is the list:
  • Bug #97476 - "Range optimizer skips rows". This bug reported by Ilya Raudsepp looks like a clear regression in MySQL 8.0.x comparing to MySQL 5.7.x at least. I get the following correct results with 5.7.29:
    mysql> SELECT t.id
        -> FROM Test t
        -> JOIN (
        ->     SELECT item_id, MAX(created_at) AS created_at
        ->     FROM Test t
        ->     WHERE (platform_id = 2) AND (item_id IN (3,2,111)) AND (type = 'Default')
        ->     GROUP BY item_id
        -> ) t2 ON t.item_id = t2.item_id
        ->   t.item_id = t2.item_id
        ->   AND t.created_at = t2.created_at
        ->   AND t.type = 'Default'
        -> WHERE t.platform_id = 2;
    +----+
    | id |
    +----+
    |  6 |
    |  3 |
    |  5 |
    +----+
    3 rows in set (0,03 sec)

    mysql> select version();
    +-----------+
    | version() |
    +-----------+
    | 5.7.29    |
    +-----------+
    1 row in set (0,02 sec)
  • Bug #97531 - "5.7 replication breakage with syntax error with GRANT management". This tricky bug reported by Simon Mudd applies also to MySQL 8.0.x. It is closed as fixed, but the fix had not made it to recent 5.7.29 and 8.0.19 releases, so you'll have to wait for few more months.
  • Bug #97552 - "Regression: LEFT JOIN with Impossible ON condition performs slowly". Yet another optimizer regression in MySQL 8 (comparing to 5.7.x) that is fixed only in MySQL 8.0.20+. The bug was reported by Fredric Johansson.
  • Bug #97648 - "Bug in order by clause in union clause". Yet another regression (at least from user's point of view) in recent MySQL 5.7.x and 8.0.x comparing to 5.6.x. This time without a "regression" tag. The bug was reported by Andrei Mart.
  • Bug #97662 - "MySQL v8.0.18 FIPS mode is no longer supported". According to Ryan L, MySQL 8.0.18+ is no longer supporting ssl_fips_mode=STRICT, as OpenSSL 1.1.1 is not FIPS-compatible and MySQL Server must be compiled using OpenSSL 1.1.1 or higher. That's interesting. Check also this link.
  • Bug #97682 - "Handler fails to trigger on Error 1049 or SQLSTATE 42000 or plain sqlexception". This regression (comparing to MySQL 5.7) was reported by Jericho Rivera. It is fixed in MySQL 8.0.20. The patch was provided by Kamil Holubicki.
  • Bug #97692 - "Querying information_schema.TABLES issue". I do not see any documented attempt to check on MySQL 8.0, so I had to add a comment to the bug report. From what I see, in MySQL 8.0.19 we still get different (empty) result from the second query, but at least now we have a warning:
    mysql> SELECT ts.TABLE_SCHEMA
        -> FROM information_schema.TABLES ts
        -> WHERE ts.TABLE_TYPE ='VIEW'
        -> AND ts.TABLE_SCHEMA NOT IN ('sys')
        -> AND ts.TABLE_COMMENT LIKE '%invalid%';
    +--------------+
    | TABLE_SCHEMA |
    +--------------+
    | test         |
    +--------------+
    1 row in set, 1 warning (0,00 sec)

    mysql> show warnings\G
    *************************** 1. row ***************************
      Level: Warning
       Code: 1356
    Message: View 'test.v' references invalid table(s) or column(s) or function(s) or definer/invoker of view lack rights to use them
    1 row in set (0,00 sec)

    mysql> select version();
    +-----------+
    | version() |
    +-----------+
    | 8.0.19    |
    +-----------+
    1 row in set (0,00 sec)
    The bug was reported by Vinicius Malvestio Grippa.
  • Bug #97693 - "ALTER USER user IDENTIFIED BY 'password' broken by invalid authentication_string". The bug was reported by Nikolai Ikhalainen. MySQL 8.0.19 is still affected.
  • Bug #97694 - "MySQL 8.0.18 fails on STOP SLAVE/START SLAVE stress test". For some reason I do not see any documented attempt to verify this on MySQL 5.7 also. The bug was reported by Przemysław Skibiński, who also suggested a fix.
  • Bug #97734 - "Document the correct method to stop slaving with MTS without a warning or error". I can only agree with this request from Buchan Milne. Please. do :)
  • Bug #97735 - "ALTER USER IF EXISTS ... WITH_MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 9999 not applied correctly". yet another bug report by Simon Mudd in this list. For some reason, again, I do not see any documented attempt to verify the bug on MySQL 8.0.x, while there is no clear reason to think it is not affected.
  • Bug #97742 - "bad item ref from correlated subquery to outer distinct table". This bug was reported by Song Zhibai, who also had contributed a patch. Based on further comments from  Øystein Grøvlen and these results:
    mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT f3 FROM t1 HAVING (SELECT 1 FROM t2 HAVING f2 LIMIT 1);
    +----+--------------------+-------+------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+-------------+
    | id | select_type        | table | partitions | type  | possible_keys | key     | key_len | ref  | rows | filtered | Extra       |
    +----+--------------------+-------+------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+-------------+
    |  1 | PRIMARY            | t1    | NULL       | ALL   | NULL          | NULL    | NULL    | NULL |    3 |   100.00 | NULL        |
    |  2 | DEPENDENT SUBQUERY | t2    | NULL       | index | NULL          | PRIMARY | 4       | NULL |    1 |   100.00 | Using index |
    +----+--------------------+-------+------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+-------------+
    2 rows in set, 2 warnings (0,00 sec)

    mysql> show warnings\G
    *************************** 1. row ***************************
      Level: Note
       Code: 1276
    Message: Field or reference 'f2' of SELECT #2 was resolved in SELECT #1
    *************************** 2. row ***************************
      Level: Note
       Code: 1003
    Message: /* select#1 */ select `test`.`t1`.`f3` AS `f3` from `test`.`t1` having (/* select#2 */ select 1 from `test`.`t2` having `test`.`t1`.`f2` limit 1)
    2 rows in set (0,00 sec)

    mysql> select version();
    +-----------+
    | version() |
    +-----------+
    | 5.7.29    |
    +-----------+
    1 row in set (0,00 sec)
    I'd say that MySQL 5.7.x is also affected, but for some reason nobody documented any attempt to verify it there. So, I've added a comment.
  • Bug #97777 - "separate global variables (from hot variables) using linker script (ELF)". Beautiful bug report from Daniel Black.With a lot of details, perf and readelf outputs and patch contributed. See also his Bug #97822 - "buf_page_get_gen buf_pool->stat.n_page_gets++ is a cpu waste", with perf analysis up to a single assembler instruction level and fix suggested.
  • Bug #97825 - "dd_mdl_acquire in dd_table_open with dict_sys->mutex hold may cause deadlock". Here I am really puzzled by no visible attempt to check the arguments of bug reporter, Dave Do, who tried to perform lock order analysis by code review. All we see as a result is this:
    "Lock order could be different, but it is irrelevant, since these are locks on totally different levels and can't, in themselves, cause any deadlock."
    What a great argument! Not a bug, surely... We trust you.
"What bugs are you talking about? I have no bugs, neither does MySQL 8!"
To summarize:
  1. MySQL 8 introduces some optimizer (and some other) regressions. They seem to be fixed fast enough, but I wonder why only Community users were able to find them not Oracle's QA...
  2. MySQL 8.0.19 is surely great, but I see many serious bugs fixed o0nly in 8.0.20+.
  3. Percona, Booking and Facebook engineers still continue contributing high quality bug reports, comments/verification details and patches. Oracle is lucky to have such nice partners in making MySQL better.
  4. I still see problems with following proper verification procedures and documenting the results. Too often the bug reported for 8.0.x is NOT checked on 5.7.x as well, regression tag is not set, and so on. Sometimes reports are closed as "Not a bug" without any attempt to follow the analysis provided or prove the point. This is sad and wrong.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Fun with Bugs #88 - On MySQL Bug Reports I am Subscribed to, Part XXII

It's Saturday night. I have a week of vacation ahead that I am going to spend at home, working on things I usually do not have time for. I already did something useful (created a couple of test cases for MariaDB bugs here and there, among other things), so why not to get some fun and continue my previous review of recent interesting MySQL bug report...

So, here is the list of 15 more MySQL community bug reports that I've subscribed to back in May and June 2019:
  • Bug #95491 - "The unused wake up in simulator AIO of function reserve_slot". I am impressed by the fact that these days many people just study InnoDB code, find problematic parts, improve them, test and prove the improvement, and submit patches to Oracle. Chen Zongzhi, who reported this bug, is one of such great people.
  • Bug #95496 - "Replication of memory tables". As pointed out by Iwo P, MySQL manual describes what happens to MEMORY tables replicated from master to slave in details, including the case of master restart. But one detail is missing - when slave with MEMORY tables restarts, even with super_read_only set, it also generates even to delete data from the table into its own binary log, with GTID, and this leads to problems in case of failover.
  • Bug #95507 - "innodb_stats_method is not honored when innodb_stats_persistent=ON". This bug was reported by my colleague Sergei Petrunia. See also related MDEV-19574  (still "Open").
  • Bug #95547 - "MySQL restarts automatically after ABORT_SERVER due to disk full". I am not sure this is a replication bug, more a problem of too primitive mysqld_safe or systemd startup scripts that do not check free space on disk or reason why mysqld process committed suicide. Anyway, this report by Przemyslaw Malkowski from Percona was accepted as a replication bug.
  • Bug #95582 - "DDL using bulk load is very slow under long flush_list". As found and proved by Fungo Wang, due to optimized away redo log writing for bulk load, to make sure such DDL is crash safe, dirtied pages must be flushed to disk synchronously. Currently this is done inefficiently, as shown in this bug report. See also a year old (and still "Open") Bug #92099 - "provide an option to record redo log for bulk loading" from the same reporter, where he asks for a way to get redo logging back (but still benefit from other "online" ALTER features). MariaDB has that option after the fix of MDEV-16809.
  • Bug #95612 - "replication breakage due to Can not lock user management caches for processing". Simon Mudd noted that in some cases simple DROP USER IF EXISTS ... breaks parallel replication in MySQL 8.0.16. Good to know that START SLAVE allows to continue :)
  • Bug #95698 - "JSON columns are returned with binary charset". This bug was reported by Daniel Book. Note that according to the original issue, DBD::MariaDB (I had no idea this exists!) works properly with MariaDB 10.3 or 10.4. I had not checked.
  • Bug #95734 - "Failing SET statement in a stored procedure changes variables". This really weird and unexpected bug was reported by Przemysław Skibiński.
  • Bug #95863 - "MTS ordered commit may cause deadlock ". Great finding by Lalit Choudhary from Percona!
  • Bug #95895 - "Shutdown takes long time when table uses AUTOINC and FOREIGN KEY constraints". It was reported by Satya Bodapati from Percona, who later contributed as patch. See also his related Bug #95898 - "InnoDB releases memory of table only on shutdown if table has FK constraint". I truly hope to see these fixed in next minor releases of MySQL. Note that originally bug (PS-5639) was reported by Sveta Smirnova.
  • Bug #95928 - "InnoDB crashes on compressed and encrypted table when changing FS block size". Make sure to check and write original filesystem block size somewhere... This bug was reported by Sergei Glushchenko from Percona.
  • Bug #95929 - "Duplicate entry for key 'PRIMARY' when querying information_schema.TABLES". This nice feature of new data dictionary of MySQL 8.0.16 under concurrent load was found by Manuel Rigger.
  • Bug #95934 - "innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0 get performance regression on 8 core machine". If I had access to 8 cores box, I'd try to check this sysbench-based complete test case immediately. I should do this on my quadcore box at least, next week. But here we see some 12 days just wasted and then bug report from Chen Zongzh ended up "Analyzing", till today, with no further feedback.
  • Bug #95954 - "CAST of negative function return value to UNSIGNED malfunctions with BIGINT". Yet another weird bug found by Manuel Rigger. There are patches (separate for 5.6, 5.7 and 8.0) contributed by Oleksandr Peresypkin.
Montjuïc is a place to enjoy nice view of Barcelona and forget about MySQL bugs. So, I could miss some interesting ones at the end of May, 2019...
To summarize:
  1. Percona engineers still contribute a lot of useful and interesting MySQL bug reports, often - with patches.
  2. I am impressed by quality of MySQL bug reports in 2019. Often we see detailed analysis, proper complete test cases and patches.
  3. There is a recent fork of DBD::mysql for MariaDB (and MySQL), DBD::MariaDB!
  4. I badly need some new hardware for running benchmarks and tests from recent bug reports...
  5. I should spend more time in May in Barcelona :)

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Fun with Bugs #74 - On MySQL Bug Reports I am Subscribed to, Part XI

For some reason the Committee of FOSDEM 2019 MySQL, MariaDB & Friends Devroom of all my talks submitted picked up the one on how to create a useful MySQL bug report, so I have no options but continue to write about MySQL bugs, as long and MySQL Community wants and even prefers to listen and read about them... That's what I do, with pleasure.

Today I'll continue my series of posts about community bug reports I am subscribed to with the review of bugs reported since October 1, 2018, starting from the oldest and skipping those MySQL 8 regression ones I've already commented on:
  • Bug #92609 - "Upgrade to 8.0.12 fails". This bug reported by Frederic Steinfels is about upgrade from MySQL 5.7 that leads to crash. Nice workaround was found:
    "The work around is delete all .TRG file (or move them to out side of mysql data folder) then update. After success we can re-create the trigger."
    The bug is really fixed in MySQL 8.0.14 according to the last comment, but for some reason it is still "Verified". Probably will be closed when MySQL 8.0.14 is released.
  • Bug #92631 - "importing dump from mysqldump --all-databases breaks SYS schema due to routines". This bug affecting MySQL 5.7 (and not 8.0) was reported by Shane Bester. Workaround is actually documented in the manual - add sys schema explicitly while dumping and dump it separately, then re-create.
  • Bug #92661 - "SELECT on key partitioned enum reading all partitions instead of 1". Interesting corner case found by Frederic Steinfels. MariaDB 10.3.7 also seems affected:
    MariaDB [test]> explain partitions select id from product where outdated='0';
    +------+-------------+---------+------------+------+---------------+----------+-
    --------+-------+------+--------------------------+
    | id   | select_type | table   | partitions | type | possible_keys | key      |
    key_len | ref   | rows | Extra                    |
    +------+-------------+---------+------------+------+---------------+----------+-
    --------+-------+------+--------------------------+
    |    1 | SIMPLE      | product | p0,p1      | ref  | outdated      | outdated |
    1       | const |    2 | Using where; Using index |
    +------+-------------+---------+------------+------+---------------+----------+-
    --------+-------+------+--------------------------+
    1 row in set (0.002 sec)

    MariaDB [test]> explain partitions select id from product where outdated='1';
    +------+-------------+---------+------------+------+---------------+----------+-
    --------+-------+------+--------------------------+
    | id   | select_type | table   | partitions | type | possible_keys | key      |
    key_len | ref   | rows | Extra                    |
    +------+-------------+---------+------------+------+---------------+----------+-
    --------+-------+------+--------------------------+
    |    1 | SIMPLE      | product | p0,p1      | ref  | outdated      | outdated |
    1       | const | 2048 | Using where; Using index |
    +------+-------------+---------+------------+------+---------------+----------+-
    --------+-------+------+--------------------------+
    1 row in set (0.002 sec)
  • Bug #92809 - "Inconsistent ResultSet for different Execution Plans". The full test case is not public and it took a lot of arguing until this bug (reported by Juan Arruti) was finally "Verified". Based on the workaround, setting optimizer_switch='materialization=off', this feature of MySQL optimizer is still problematic.
  • Bug #92850 - "Bad select+order by+limit performance in 5.7". As Sveta Smirnova demonstrated, there are still cases when FORCE INDEX hints really needed to help optimizer to use proper plan, even in somewhat obvious case of single table and single proper index... What a surprise!
  • Bug #92882 - "MTS not replication crash-safe with GTID and all the right parameters." As  Jean-François Gagné proved, at least statement-based multi-threaded replication with GTIDs is not safe in case of OS crash. Good that there is an easy enough workaround: stop slave; reset slave; start slave; See also his Bug #93081 - "Please implement a better relay log recovery." that refers to several more known problems with relay log recovery.
  • Bug #92949 - "add auto_increment column as PK cause RBR replication inconsistent". This probably should never happen in production (adding primary key while data are already active changed concurrently), but still this is a nice corner case reported by Fungo Wang.
  • Bug #92996 - "ANALYZE TABLE still locks tables 10 years later". Domas Mituzas is trying hard to escalate this well known problem of blocking queries if ANALYZE TABLE was executed at some wrong time (when long running query against the table was in progress). The problem was resolved this year in Percona Server, see this blog post. See also my MDEV-15101 (fix is planned for version 10.4 in MariaDB).
  • Bug #93033 - "Missing info on partitioned tables in I_S.INNODB_COLUMNS after upgrade to 8.0". Yet another regression in MySQL 8 vs 5.7 was reported by Alexey Kopytov.
  • Bug #93049 - "ORDER BY pk, otherdata should just use PK". There is no reason to use filesort, as Domas Mituzas kindly noted. MariaDB is also, unfortunately, affected.
  • Bug #93083 - "InnoDB: Failing assertion: srv_read_only_mode || trx->in_depth > 0". This Severity 6 bug (only debug binaries are directly affected) was reported by Ramesh Sivaraman from Percona QA. At least it was verified instantly (I've subscribed to double check what happens to bugs with low severity levels).
I'll stop for now. More detailed review of remaining bugs reported in November is coming soon.

Sheep are everywhere in East Sussex and bugs are everywhere in MySQL. Not that many, but still they are visible.
To summarize my conclusions from this list:
  1. Sometimes it takes too much efforts to force proper bug report processing. I had written more about this here.
  2. Having materialization=on in optimizer_switch in MySQL 5.7+ may cause wrong results. Take care to double check.
  3. There still cases of single table SELECTs where optimizer can do a much better job. FORCE INDEX helps, sometimes.
  4. Multi-threaded statement-based replication in MySQL 5.6 and 5.7 is not crash safe, even with GTIDs, relay_log_info_repository-TABLE and relay_log_recovery=ON. A lot of improvements in relay log recovery are needed.
  5. Oracle engineers still care to document workarounds in active public bug reports. This is great!
  6. Percona still fixes some really important and annoying bugs way before other vendors.
  7. MySQL 8 is different in many small details, so regressions are to be expected.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

On MySQL Replication Bugs

While writing about problematic Oracle MySQL features previously I concentrated mostly on InnoDB problems that I have to fight with really often and deliberately skipped replication from even the preliminary list of features to study in details for that blog post. First of all, I mostly work with MariaDB users now, and implementation of many replication features in MariaDB is notably different already (and has its own list of known problems). But this happened also because (asynchronous) replication plays a key role in most MySQL environments and deserves a detailed study in a separate post.

It took me some time to prepare lists of recent bugs reported for MySQL replication (row-based and statement-based, GTIDs, multi-threaded and crash safe, hopefully) and then try to summarize my findings from them. Looks like I have something related to share today, finally.

Gondolas in Venice often look very similar to each other. They all are probably replicas of few different original designs. But small differences exist. This should not happen to your data in a replication setup...
Let me start with a summary of problems I found and then proceed with the lists of bug reports I based my conclusions on:
  1. Both minor problems with mysqlbinlog outputs, small regressions, missing useful features and real bugs (that may lead to data differences on slaves or break replication), hangs (including MTS deadlocks), crashes and performance problems with replication that can affect production setups do not seem to get high priority over last 2 years. Even those reported in public bugs database by famous MySQL Community members or current and former Oracle MySQL engineers.
  2. GTIDs and replication crash safety features were supposed to make it easier to use replication in production. In reality there are some GTID-specific ways to break replication, and it is still not as crash safe as expected in many use cases.
  3. Multi-threaded slave (a.k.a MTS or parallel replication) bugs, even serious and verified, are ignored for way more than last 2 years! The feature is not completed and may not help as much as one may expect.
  4. Manual is still wrong or missing when describing some details of current replication implementation.
  5. Nobody cares much about debug assertions found by Percona QA. We may have some bombs in the replication code that may explode in a weird way any time. 
  6. It seems group replication bugs often get proper attention fast, but nobody in Oracle has enough time to deal with asynchronous replication bugs properly. Some of them hang around without even proper verification for months...
Now let's get into details. Here is the list of some recent row-based replication specific bugs and feature requests:
  • Bug #91822 - "incorrect datatype in RBR event when column is NULL and not explicit in query". The column missing in the INSERT statement is given the datatype of the column immediately preceding it. This bug was reported by Ernie Souhrada back in July.
  • Bug #89339 - "RBR slave index choosing logic is too simple". As Fungo Wang pointed out based on source code review, it is based on rules, not considered data distribution at all. Slave uses primary key if it exists, otherwise tries unique key that does not allow NULLs (if any), then tries other keys and finally falls back to full table scan if there are no indexes. When there is no primary or unique key on columns not allowing NULL values, no statistics is taken into account when picking up indexes vs full table scan, and this easily leads to bad plans. Surely, one has to have primary keys in all tables, especially those involved in replication, but it would be great if slave code was a bit smarter in corner cases (as MariaDB's one).
    By the way, setting slave_rows_search_algorithms to HASH_SCAN may not help, as it may be too slow in practice. See Bug #84887 by Dennis Gao for more details and an example of perf and gdb usage for the analysis.
  • Bug #89297 - "please allow number to varchar slave_type_conversions if target is large enough". Nice feature request by Shane Bester.
  • Bug #88791 - "Binary log for generated column contains new value as WHERE clause, not old value". This bug was reported by MC Brown. Surely, mysqlbinlog output for row-based events is not supposed to be 100% valid SQL for copy-paste, but it should not be misleading.
  • Bug #88595 - "Row-based master-master replication broken by add column or drop column". This is more a documentation issue. It's strange to see this limitation not documented here.
  • Bug #88223 - "Replication with no tmpdir space and InnoDB as tmp_storage_engine can break". It's really weird to see this bug reported by Sveta Smirnova hanging in "Analyzing" status for almost a year!
  • Bug #88057 - "Intermediary slave does not log master changes with binlog_rows_query_log_events". Yet another bug report from Sveta, this time "Verified". Row query log events for UPDATEs and DELETEs are NOT recorded in the binary log by the intermediate masters...
  • Bug #85292 - "unreachable statement in function process_event with event type QUERY_EVENT". Shane Bester found a part of the code that probably should be rewritten. No further public attention to this report for 1.5 years...
  • Bug #84287 - "row inserts, statement updates, persistent stats lead to table scans+ lag slaves". Yet another great finding by Shane Bester. As often happens, another problematic feature I truly hate, InnoDB's persistent statistics, is also involved in this case, leading to bad performance on slave.
  • Bug #83431 - "RBR slave's "BEGIN" binlog query event doesn't carry a session database name". It was reported almost 2 years ago by Teng Li.
  • Bug #83418 - "When binlog_row_image is MINIMAL, some updates queries logs redundant columns". This was reported by Abhinav Sharma also almost two years ago.
  • Bug #83090 - "AUTO_INCREMENT not updated when using INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE". This bug was reported by Monty Solomon two years ago. See also his related Bug #83030 - "AUTO_INCREMENT not updated when using REPLACE INTO".
  • Bug #80821 - "Replication breaks if multi-table DELETE is used in conjunction with Foreign Key". I do not understand why this perfect (regression?) bug report by Philip Stoev, with a clear MTR test case was immediately verified and then just hangs around for 2.5 years...
  • Bug #80770 - "Compression of row-based event". Great feature contributed by Davi Arnaut.
  • Bug #79831- "Unexpected error message on crash-safe slave with max_relay_log_size set". Let me just conclude this with a 5.6-spcific (probably) bug report by yours truly...
I have to stop at this point, as other RBR-related bug reports are known for way more time and probably are just forgotten for good already by MySQL development. They hardly have a chance for the fix any time soon.

Let's continue with replication bugs that are not closely related to row-based binlog format:
  • Bug #92398 - "point in time recovery using mysqlbinlog broken with temporary table -> errors". Shane Bester found yet another case when statement-based binlog format may lead to problems for point in time recovery.
  • Bug #92252 - "Mysql generates gtid gaps because of option slave-skip-errors". This bug was reported by Pin Lin. We get gaps in GTID values on slave when errors are skipped. If binlog files on master include transactions which were applied on slave and hit errors in slave-skip-errors were purged, slave can't reconnect to master and reports error 1236. Features that were supposed to make replication more robust lead to more breaks in replication.
  • Bug #92132 - "secure-file-priv breaks LOAD DATA INFILE replication in statement mode on 5.7.23". This regression bug was reported by Nicolai Plum. Recent MySQL 5.7 and 8.0 versions are affected.
  • Bug #92109 - "Please make replication crash safe with GTID and less durable setting (bis)." Jean-François Gagné keeps looking for options to make replication really crash safe in all practically important cases.
  • Bug #92073 - "int change_master(): Assertion `mi->rli->inited' failed." Roel Van de Paar continues his QA efforts in a hope to make MySQL better one day and reports all debug assertions in public. In this case we seem to have a kind of regression in 8.0 vs 5.7. Check also these his bug reports: Bug #91980 - "Assertion `head->variables.gtid_next.type == ANONYMOUS_GTID' failed." and Bug #90946 - "Assertion `get_state() >= 0' failed on RESET MASTER while tx_read_only". Debug assertions are in the code for a reason usually, so in a latter bug report Roel recently asked for some update...
  • Bug #91766 - "Log of replication position when running CHANGE MASTER TO is wrong.". Jean-François Gagné found yet another annoying detail - one would expect the error log to have data about the SQL Thread position, but it has data about the IO Thread position.
  • Bug #91744 - "START SLAVE UNTIL going further than it should." Now this bug reported by  Jean-François Gagné is really serious. Still it hangs around "Open" since July 20...
  • Bug #91633 - "Replication failure (errno 1399) on update in XA tx after deadlock". XA is yet another MySQL feature that is doomed to stay half-baked it seems... More on this you should expect in a separate blog post one day. The bug that causes replication break was reported by Lukas Sydorowski.
  • The last but not the least bug in this list (that is actually long if we try to check all active bugs reported over last 2 years) that I want to include is Bug #90448 - "INSERT IGNORE not ignored on SQL thread", by Simon Mudd. Restarting slave helps and it seems MySQL 8.0.x is not affected. See also his Bug #89876 - "mysqladmin flush-hosts is not safe in GTID mode". 
I have to stop at some point. In conclusion let me review a list of (less) recent bugs in a multi-threaded slave (MTS) implementation specifically:
  • Bug #91477 - "Slave writes less when connected intermediary master with blackhole engine". Just 2 threads are used in this case as found by Sveta Smirnova.
  • Bug #90342 - "MySQL parallel replication automatically restarts". Nobody cares about this crashing bug for 5+ months. It's still "Open".
  • Bug #89247 - "Deadlock with MTS when slave_preserve_commit_order = ON.Jean-François Gagné reported this 9 months ago, the bug was verifvied and based on last comments and pt-pmp outputs the hang really happen for many users. Still nobody cares in any obvious way.
  • Bug #89229 - "FLUSH PRIVILEGES may cause MTS deadlock". This bug was reported by Libing Song 9 months ago.
  • Bug #87796 - "Commit_order_manager can't terminate MTS worker properly when deadlock happens". This bug was reported by Seunguck Lee a year ago!
  • Bug #85747 - "Documentation on MTS statistics". Yet another case of missing manual reported by Juan Arruti:
    "I didn't find information in MySQL reference manual about MTS statistics, I had to look into source code in order to get more information about them."
  • Bug #85142 - "reducing MTS checkpointing causes high IO load". The bug reported by Trey Raymond is "Verified" for 1.5 years. Check also his Bug #81386 - "MTS hangs on file related *_EVENT forced checkpoint" and Bug #81385 - "relay log info not updated after using sql_after_mts_gaps" that are "Open" since May 2016!
  • Bug #73066 - "Replication stall with multi-threaded replication". Ovais Tariq reported this bug more than 4 years ago, when both still worked in Percona. Nobody cares to fix it.
  • Bug #71495 - "Logging of MTS breakage is insufficient." One of Oracle customers who use MTS in production, Simon Mudd had reported this practical problem 4.5+ years ago. No fix, no comments from Oracle engineers from more than 3 years.
I have to stop at this stage, as checking more/older replication related bugs makes me even more sad than I planned or want to be. We see fixes in every release, but the backlog seems huge. Dear Oracle MySQL engineers, please, review public MySQL replication bug reports collected over last 4-5 years and spend some more time and resources on processing and fixing them! Otherwise this Acqua alta of bugs will make this great legacy feature obsolete one sad day.

I had not planned to study semi-sync replication bugs in this post (maybe, some day). If you are interested in more details about this feature, crash safety of replication, parallel replication and replication in general, I suggest you to check J-F Gagné's MySQL Blog.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

On Fine MySQL Manual

Today I am going to provide some details on the last item in my list of problems with Oracle's way of MySQL server development, maintenance of MySQL Manual. I stated that:
"MySQL Manual still have many details missing and is not fixed fast enough.
Moreover, it is not open source...
"
Let me explain the above:
  1. MySQL Reference Manual is not open source. It used to be built from DocBook XML sources. Probably that's still the case. But you can not find the source code in open repositories (please, correct me if I am wrong, I tried to search...) That's because it is NOT open source. It says this clearly in Preface:
    "This documentation is NOT distributed under a GPL license. Use of this documentation is subject to the following terms:
    ...
    Any other use, such as any dissemination of printed copies or use of this documentation, in whole or in part, in another publication, requires the prior written consent from an authorized representative of Oracle. Oracle and/or its affiliates reserve any and all rights to this documentation not expressly granted above.
    "
    It was NOT Oracle who closed the source (as far as I remember, the manual was not GPL even in 2004, when I started to care about MySQL in general). But Oracle had a chance to change the license and set up some better contribution process for MySQL Community users, with many good writers among them. They decided not do this, so creators of forks and derived software have to duplicate efforts and rewrite everything themselves, and the only real way to help make the manual better is to report bugs.
  2. Quality of new documentation is not improved much. We, MySQL Community users, have to report bugs in the manual, as it still has some details missing or documented wrongly. Let me illustrate this with recent 10 or so documentation requests users made (I skipped reports for features I do not care about for now, like group replication):
    • Bug #91955 - "8.0 broke plugin API for C". According to the comment from Oracle developer in this bug reported by Laurynas Biveinis, writing plugins in C is not supported any more... But this change is NOT properly documented.
    • Bug #91781 - "Add version matrix in "Chapter 2 Keywords and Reserved Words". Good idea in the manual is not consistently implemented.
    • Bug #91743 - "performance_schema.data_locks not working correctly". Nice feature was added to Performance Schema (now we can check and study InnoDB locks with SQL!), but it is still not completely and properly documented.
    • Bug #91654 - "Handling an Unexpected Halt of a Replication Slave" Documentation is uncertain". This is also an example of improper bug handling - when I worked in Oracle newer bugs were usually declared duplicates of older ones. Here the opposite decision was made, even though both reports were from the same user, Uday Varagani, who explicitly asked to change the decision. Obviously, documentation requests do not get any extra care comparing to other kinds of bugs, quite to the contrary...
    • Bug #91648 - "Numeric literals must be a number between 0 and 9999". Surely ports with numbers larger than 9999 can be used.
    • Bug #91642 - "Document how protocol version 4.0 and 4.1 differ on how strings are terminated". As noted by Rene' Cannao', comments in the code are still sometimes more useful than documentation.
    • Bug #91549 - "MDL lock queue order seems to depend on table names". Make sure to read last comment in this nice request by Shane Bester. Dmitry Lenev provides some details on priorities of MDL locks in it. There are still cases when bugs and documentation requests document some details better than fine MySQL Manual!
    • Bug #90997 - "Handling an Unexpected Halt of a Replication Slave" manual page is wrong". Sveta Smirnova highlighted a totally misleading statement in the manual.
    • Bug #90935 - "Modify relay_log_recovery Documentation". Simple documentation request stays "Open" for 3 months. Definitely processing documentation requests is not a highest priority for Oracle engineers.
    • Bug #90680 - "dragnet logging: document how to use / find error_symbol codes". Even if request comes from a customer or otherwise well known bug reporter, like Simon Mudd, and it's related to some totally new cool feature of MySQL 8, it can wait for the fix for months...
    You can make your own conclusions from the above. But I do not see any good trends in the way new documentation is created or documentation requests are processed recently. Same problems as 4 years ago (see more on that in a side note below).
  3. Older documentation requests get even less attention than recent ones sometimes, even though they may highlight problems with software itself, not the MySQL Manual. Let me illustrate this with a few bugs I reported:
    • Bug #83640 - "Locks set by DELETE statement on already deleted record". I explicitly asked to
      "...document in the manual what locks this kind of DELETE sets when it encountered a record already marked as deleted, and why"
      This still had NOT happened. Moreover, eventually both MySQL and MariaDB engineers decided that current implementation of locking for this case is wrong and can be improved, so this report ended up as InnoDB bug. Check related  MDEV-11215 for more details.
    • Bug #73413 - "Manual does not explain MTS implementation in details". This is one of my favorite documentation requests. I've got a suggestion to explain what I want to see documented, in details. I tried my best, but if you want to get more details, read this blog.
    • Bug #72368 - "Empty/zero statistics for imported tablespace until explicit ANALYZE TABLE". This is a bug in the way persistent statistics (the feature I truly hate) in InnoDB is re-estimated "automatically". But until the bug is fixed, I asked to document current implementation (and problems with it). So, where current implementation is properly documented? If only in the bug reports...
    • Bug #71294 - "Manual page for P_S.FILE_INSTANCES table does not explain '~' in FILE_NAME".  They pretend they do not get the point:
      "Per Marc Alff, the Performance Schema is simply reporting what it gets from runtime. If runtime is reporting nonexistent filenames, that's a server issue.

      Recategorizing this as a server bug.
      "
    • Bug #71293 - "Manual page for P_S.FILE_INSTANCES table does not explain EVENT_NAME values". Now they are waiting for the new DOCUMENTATION column in the setup_instruments table to be filled in with something by server developers... The code is the documentation? OK, bus as we know from the experience (see slides 44-46 here) chances to get a bug in Performance Schema fixed fast are even less than to see it properly and completely documented...
There are more problems with MySQL documentation (not only reference manual), but at the moment I consider 3 highlighted and illustrated above the most serious.

Regent's Canal is nice. If I only knew how to operate the locks there... MySQL Manual also misses some information about locks.
As a side note, it's not the first time I write about MySQL Manual. You can find some useful details in the following posts:
  • "What's wrong with MySQL Manual". In 2014, after spending few weeks reporting up to 5 documentation bugs per day, I thought that, essentially, there is nothing much wrong with it - it's fine, well indexed by Google and has meaningful human-readable URLs. Few problems listed were lack of careful readers (I tried my best to fix that), limited attention to old documentation requests, some pages with not so much useful content and lack of "How to" documents. The later I also tried to fix to some small extent in this blog, see howto tagged posts. The real fix came mostly from Percona's blog, though.
  • I have a special "missing manual" tag for blog posts that mention at least one bug in the manual.
  • I tried to use "missing_manual" tag consistently for my own documentation requests. Last year I shared a detailed enough review of the bugs with that tag that were still active.
As a yet another side note, I tried once to create a kind of community driven "missing manual" project, but failed. Writing manual from scratch is a (hard) full time job, while my full time job is providing support to users of MySQL, MariaDB and Percona software...

That said, I also wanted to join MySQL's documentation team in the past, but this was not possible at least because I am not a native speaker. If anything changed in this regard, I am still open to a job offer of this kind. My conditions for an acceptable offer from Oracle are known to all interested parties and they include (but are not limited to) at least 4 times the salary I had before I quit (it was almost 6 years ago) and working for Oracle's office in Paris (because in Oracle office you ere employed by formally matters a lot for your happiness and success as employee).

In case of no offer in upcoming week, I'll just continue to write my annoying but hopefully somewhat useful blog posts (until MySQL Reference Manual becomes true open source project ;)