MariaDB 10.1 Release Candidate

I installed the MariaDB 10.1 Release Candidate. Nothing interesting happened, which from MariaDB’s point of view is good. But here’s how I tried to make it interesting. Some of this applies to late releases of MariaDB 10.0 as well.

Loop with MAKE INSTALL

My habit is to download the source to directory X and then say “cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/X” (the same directory), then “make”, then “make install”. That doesn’t work any more. Now I can’t install in the same directory that I downloaded in. Not a big deal; perhaps I’m the only person who had this habit.

Crash with ALTER

In an earlier blog post General Purpose Storage Engines in MariaDB I mentioned a crash, which I’m happy to say is fixed now. Here’s another way to crash, once again involving different storage engines.

Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 2
Server version: 10.1.8-MariaDB Source distribution

Copyright (c) 2000, 2015, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

MariaDB [(none)]> INSTALL SONAME 'ha_tokudb';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.57 sec)

MariaDB [(none)]> USE test
Database changed
MariaDB [test]> CREATE TABLE t (id INT UNIQUE, s2 VARCHAR(10)) ENGINE=tokudb;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.56 sec)

MariaDB [test]> INSERT INTO t VALUES (1,'ABCDEFGHIJ');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.04 sec)

MariaDB [test]> INSERT INTO t VALUES (2,'1234567890');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.05 sec)

MariaDB [test]> CREATE INDEX i ON t (s2);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.64 sec)                                   
Records: 0  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

MariaDB [test]> ALTER TABLE t engine=innodb;
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.53 sec)               
Records: 2  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

MariaDB [test]> ALTER TABLE t engine=tokudb;
ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server during query

… Do not do this on a production system, as it will disable all your databases.
[ UPDATE 2015-09-29: This is apparently due to a problem with jemalloc which should only happen if one builds from source on Ubuntu 12.04. MariaDB was aware and had supplied extra information in its Knowledge Base, which I missed. Thanks to Elena Stepanova. ]

PREPARE within PREPARE

No doubt everyone encounters this situation at least once:

MariaDB [test]> prepare stmt1 from 'prepare stmt2 from @x';
ERROR 1295 (HY000): This command is not supported in the prepared statement protocol yet

… and then everyone else gets on with their lives, because preparing a prepare statement isn’t top-of-agenda. Not me. So I welcome the fact that I can now say:

MariaDB [test]> prepare stmt1 from 'begin not atomic prepare stmt2 from @x; end';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Statement prepared

So now if I execute stmt1, stmt2 is prepared. This is part of the “compound statement” feature.

Evade the MAX QUERIES PER HOUR limit

Suppose some administrator has said

GRANT ALL ON customer.* TO 'peter'@'localhost' WITH MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 20;

Well, now, thanks again to the “compound statement” feature, I can evade that and do 1000 queries. Here’s the test I used:

SET @a = 0;
DELIMITER //
WHILE @a < 1000 DO INSERT INTO t VALUES (@a);
SET @a = @a + 1;
END WHILE;//
DELIMITER ;

No error. So with a little advance planning, I could put 1000 different statements in a user variable, pick off one at a time from within the loop, and execute. One way of looking at this is: the WHILE ... END WHILE is a single statement. Another way to look at this is: new features introduce new hassles for administrators. Such, however, is progress. I clapped for the compound-statement feature in an earlier blog post and ended with: "But MariaDB 10.1.1 is an early alpha, and nothing is guaranteed in an alpha, so it's too early to say that MariaDB is ahead in this respect." I'm glad to say that statement is obsolete now, because this is MariaDB 10.1.8, not early alpha but release candidate.

The true meaning of the OR REPLACE clause

MariaDB has decided to try to be consistent with CREATE and DROP statements, because frankly nobody could ever remember: which CREATE statements allow CREATE IF NOT EXISTS, which CREATE statements allow CREATE OR REPLACE, which DROP statements allow DROP IF EXISTS? I wrote a handy chart in MySQL Worklog#3129 Consistent Clauses in CREATE and DROP. Now it's obsolete. The MariaDB version of the chart will have a boring bunch of "yes"es in every row.

But OR REPLACE behaviour is just a tad un-Oracle-ish. The Oracle 12c manual's description is "Specify OR REPLACE to re-create the [object] if it already exists. You can use this clause to change the definition of an existing [object] without dropping, re-creating, and regranting object privileges previously granted on it." That's not what MariaDB is doing. MariaDB drops the object and then creates it again, in effect. You can see that because you need to have DROP privilege on the object in order to say CREATE OR REPLACE.

And here's where it gets a tad un-MySQL-ish too. If you say "CREATE OR REPLACE x ...,", causing the dropping of an existing x, and then say SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Com%', you'll see that the Com_drop_* counter is zero. That is: according to the privilege requirements, x is being dropped. But according to the SHOW statement, x is not being dropped. Decent folk wouldn't use SHOW anyway, so this won't matter.

An effect on us

One of the little features of ocelotgui (the Ocelot GUI application for MySQL and MariaDB) is that one can avoid using DELIMITER when typing in a statement. The program counts the number of BEGINs (or WHILEs or LOOPs etc.) and matches them against the number of ENDs, so it doesn't prematurely ship off a statement to the server until the user presses Enter after the final END. However, this feature is currently working only for compound statements within CREATE statements. Now that compound statements are stand-alone, this needs adjusting.

Now that I've mentioned ocelotgui again, I'll add that if you go to the https://github.com/ocelot-inc/ocelotgui download page and scroll past the install instructions, you'll find more pictures, and a URL of the debugger reference, for version 0.7 alpha.

, September 20, 2015. Category: MariaDB.

About pgulutzan

Co-author of four computer books. Software Architect at MySQL/Sun/Oracle from 2003-2011, and at HP for a little while after that. Currently with Ocelot Computer Services Inc. in Edmonton Canada.

3 Comments

  1. Sergei Golubchik says:

    Com_ status variables count statements, not their actions. For a CREATE statement, some Com_create* variable is incremented. For a DROP statement — a Com_drop* variable.

    I don’t remember anyone complaining that INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE doesn’t increment Com_update counter.

  2. Elena Stepanova says:

    Peter, could you please post or send me by email your cmake options, server cnf/command-line options, and the environment details you are testing on? The error log and the git commit number or a link to the sources that you used could also be useful if you still have them. So far I could not reproduce the crash on switching a table between TokuDB and InnoDB as you described above, so there must be something important that I am missing. Thanks.

  3. Jörg Brühe says:

    On “MAKE INSTALL” and the location:
    While using the download directory as the installation target may make builds easy (one place only), it also introduces uncertainties:
    You do not know whether some file was installed intentionally, or is the remnant of download. You might end up having files conflicting with each other (source provides both, and installation takes only one) or any other kind of hassle.
    IMO (and based on my experience in building MySQL), separating download and installation directory is the better way.
    Kind regards, Jörg