An open MySQL bug receives a real Birthday cake

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=20786

by ted_turner • 13 years ago

406 78 13 years ago

bugs.mysql.com

DamnYuppie• 13 years ago

Damnit, now I want cake and ice cream!

yxhuvud• 13 years ago

I cried a little on the inside when I saw the proposed C regexp 'solution'.

famousactress6• 13 years ago

I think gittip is great, and I understand this is the opposite of their philosophy, but I want a well-used bounty program for these things.

I mentioned some Django bugs that are huge for us that were finally fixed in 1.6 in another thread [1]. I'd have personally pledged a couple hundred dollars to have them fixed, and probably could have gotten considerably more pledged from my company. Does this tool/platform exist and I just don't know about it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5958281

[Edit]

Thanks for the replies. Pledgie and bountysource look interesting and I suppose really close to what I was imagining, in spirit. Fundamentally, I'd like to see something well-executed help formalize the process behind what motivated Andrew's awesome Django migrations kickstarter [2]. I really like the way that came together because it had the buy-in of the team, and there-by inspired confidence in potential backers.

[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migr...

GuiA2• 13 years ago

Have you tried (politely) emailing a core dev? That could work.

famousactress6• 13 years ago

You mean sending a polite email offering a couple hundred dollars to fix a bug? I haven't. In addition to seeming tacky, I think the idea behind a bounty system is that it provides a way to crowd-source the effort and I wonder if having more demonstrated skin in the game around key issues might help reduce bike-shedding, or better convey the tangible value an issue has to users.

rpicard2• 13 years ago

Is this what you're thinking of? https://www.bountysource.com/

JulianWasTaken• 13 years ago

Nice. I signed up, but it doesn't look like there's much listed. Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to search for bounties to work on?!

buovjaga• 13 years ago

Some others:

https://www.catincan.com/

http://bountyoss.com/

http://funding.openinitiative.com/

In development: https://snowdrift.coop/

mindprince• 13 years ago

You can try FreedomSponsors - http://www.freedomsponsors.org/

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced Oracle (ORCL), listed on both the S&P-500 and the NASDAQ-100, needs or will accept bug fixing donations, especially since MySQL is a competitor to their flagship Oracle DB and there was quite a lot of disgruntlement around the acquisition. Maybe if you gave money to MariaDB it would work.

famousactress6• 13 years ago

Agreed, fuck 'em (not that you were saying that, but I am). My point was I want something like this for projects and bugs I care about in general. I don't care about this bug, but can relate to the cake-maker.

To anyone not yet familiar, Maria is a really exciting fork of MySQL - https://mariadb.org/

dragonwriter2• 13 years ago

MySQL is a competitor to their flagship Oracle DB

Does it really? I mean, sure, they are both RDBMS's, but that's a pretty broad market. Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

I can see an argument that MySQL competes with some of the same products that Oracle DB competes with (but in different market segments than where Oracle DB does), but I don't see them as directly competitive in any significant sense.

tonylampada3• 13 years ago

Oracle might not accept bug fixing donations. But it should accept bug fixing patches from an independent developer. And that developer might accept a bug fixing donation.

That's where a service like http://freedomsponsors.org comes in handy ;-)

lotsofcows• 13 years ago

Fortunately, lots of people other than Oracle work on the MySQL code. They would be susceptible to bug fixing donations. Hell, you could outright hire a Percona consultant.

falcolas• 13 years ago

There are companies which you can pay to produce mysql fixes you specify. One of which is Percona. Won't be as cheap as gittip or something similar, but you'll get the results without relying on a bug hitting the top of someone elses' priority list.

tonylampada3• 13 years ago

So Percona is able to create a customized fork of MySQL for you? won't that create a maintenance problem in the future? I mean, you won't be able to get official update releases anymore.

tonylampada3• 13 years ago

http://freedomsponsors.org is a crowdfunding platform for Open Source projects.

This is how it works:

1) Someone places a bounty for a problem (tipically an issue registered on an issue tracker)

2) More people might want to sponsor the same issue

3) A developer solves the issue

4) The sponsors verify the solution and pay the developer

The FreedomSponsors website itself is an open source web application, written in Django. Funny fact - some of its own issues have been sponsored in the website.

The source code - along with instructions on how to run it - can be found on Github. https://github.com/freedomsponsors/www.freedomsponsors.org

famousactress6• 13 years ago

Hi Tony! Sorry, getting to this late. freedomsponsers.org looks totally in line with what I was imagining. I presume you built it, so thanks! I hope it gets traction.

[Totally unsolicited... I'd vote to change it's name. I know it seems silly/shallow but I thought of a million and a half things that it might be before I clicked he link, and none of them were even close to what it is. (Mostly I would have assumed it to be a Koch Brothers fundraising organization)]

olalonde2• 13 years ago

Would be cool if you could submit an automated test and your bounty was automatically awarded as soon as the test passes.

jdotjdot• 13 years ago

A little risky though, if your test is imperfect. People may work to outsmart the tests rather than actually solve the bugs.

bcoates• 13 years ago

I don't believe in autoincrement so I'm not up to date on the evil things you can do with it, so I'm unclear why this bug matters: All it does is change the arbitrarily chosen start value for new rows, what could that break?

The existing behavior makes more sense anyway, as it preserves 'truncate table' <=> 'restore nodata dump' equivalence better.

miahi• 13 years ago

That is also a way to solve it: make it a documented change. But it looks like it was completely ignored. So happy birthday!

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

It's less that it would break anything and more that it's philosophically wrong to be outputting what's basically a historical max value field when asked not to output data.

fletchowns• 13 years ago

Using compressed air to blow out the candles was a nice touch.

kryten3• 13 years ago

Until you get a can of cheap imported "air duster" air which contains propane propellant still and instantly results in a firey ball of death...

Only posting this because I've done that before :)

mindslight• 13 years ago

That's still nicer than the thermal decomposition products of fluoroethanes.

josh2600• 13 years ago

Personally, it's the guy's laughing that does it for me.

What does this bug cause?

byroot• 13 years ago

It pack the autoincrement value inside the create table statement generated by mysqldump even if you use the --no-data option.

dangrossman• 13 years ago

`mysqldump` is a utility included with MySQL to dump a copy of tables and their data to a text file of SQL queries. Tables may contain a column with the AUTO_INCREMENT property where values in that column are generated from a sequence (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

The bug requests that the table definition written to the dump file by this utility not contain the current value of the AUTO_INCREMENT sequence when the option to dump only definitions, not data, is used.

nodesocket• 13 years ago

Today is my actual birthday, me and bug #20786 should share that delicious cake and ice cream.

croisillon• 13 years ago

And, cross-commenting from the Tau Manifesto post, "tau" means "for you" in lithuanian, so go ahead and have a delicious slice of HN homepage for your birthday.

gkop• 13 years ago

The conventional workaround:

  $ mysqldump -d my_database | sed 's/ AUTO_INCREMENT=[0-9]*\b//' > dump.sql

shdon• 13 years ago

That's also listed in the comments for the bug, as well as some (contrived) examples as to when it wouldn't work. Surprising it hasn't been fixed, considering how simple the true fix is.

binarymax• 13 years ago

For those unclear of the reasons this is bad (aside from the assumption that the pure raw data structure should not have any artifacts of custom data definition) - it is probably something in code or, more likely, initialisation data, that is expecing the Id to be something. This may be a file of SQL inserts that is run after the database is created, with hardcoded primary keys. This is an antipattern of course, but it doesn't excuse the fact that pure structure dumps should remain as such. (disclaimer - I have little experience with mysql, but have seen these same antipatterns in SQL server, oracle, and db2 data init scripts far too often).

morgo• 13 years ago

I have a rudimentary knowledge of MySQL Internals, so I am going to take a guess why it has taken so long.

They want to implement this feature server side, which means that they either have to add: (1) A new server setting (SET SHOW_CREATE_TABLE_FORMAT = Blah) -or- (2) New syntax (SHOW CREATE TABLE NOAUTOINC mytable).

Adding new settings is always evil, and adds to product confusion/complexity.

Adding new syntax is a bit evil in MySQL's case since they use a generic yacc parser, and might have to add a new reserved word (truthfully, I'm not 100% sure on that one). There is also a preference to only add reserved words to major new versions.

druiid2• 13 years ago

Sadly MySQL has a history of bugs like this. There are a few we have run across that have probably been open longer than this bug, and yet have not been fixed. I'd have to look the bug numbers up from e-mail, but yeah.. there are tons of mines out there in MySQL just waiting for you to hit them, and upon further discovery, someone else found out about it years ago!

kryten3• 13 years ago

I've had many experiences like this as well. Even some of our paid for software gets scared if you use a buggy MySQL version (TeamCity for example refuses to start on certain MySQL versions).

Switched to postgresql now - just works!

raverbashing• 13 years ago

But until you get to the point that "just works" it's a huge pain in the behind (configuring, etc)

Also, the SQL syntax is usually a pain to get it first (MySQL is much more tolerant for a newcomer)

And yes, PSQL commands usually work in MySQL (except for the specific stuff, like \dt but that's not even SQL so...)

brianpgordon• 13 years ago

I was just reading this article; you might be interested:

http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else

druiid2• 13 years ago

shrug Everyone hates on MySQL, and I have my periods of hate as well (mostly I think they boil down to actually hating the Developers of MySQL, not the actual software)... But the thing is that for our purposes MySQL works and works well 99.9% of the time. Additionally the actual big, real issues/beefs people have with MySQL are mostly fixed in 5.6 (multi-threaded slaves (really guys, you should have fixed that years ago), online ALTER TABLE (again... wtf, why was that not fixed years ago)).

He also is hating on PHP in that article, which seems like prime HN bait, because as it does every time there is a PHP hate article on here, everyone actually doing real work comes and and says 'Okay, have fun with your rubies and nodes'.

With all that said, recently a lot of our data has started to be organized outside of MySQL (a lot more Couchbase and Solr usage), but MySQL is still there driving the core data. I'd say it all boils down to right tool for the job.

ars• 13 years ago

I store the dump of the database in source control, so several years ago I made a small program mysqldump_ddl to strip out all ephemeral data that clutters up the changes:

    #!/bin/sh
    mysqldump --no-data $* | sed 's/ AUTO_INCREMENT=[0-9]*//' | egrep -v '^-- (MySQL dump|Server version|Dump completed on)'

Now the database diff only has actual changes. (Mostly - sometimes new versions of mysql change other things.)

lcampbell• 13 years ago

Well, I just took 10 minutes to write an ad-hoc parser that will probably fix the bug (it works around the tricky test cases in the thread)[1]. I don't really understand why they want to move stuff onto the server-side, there may be some other trickery I'm missing.

Please feel free to use as-is and integrate it into mysqldump. I can't be bothered to create an account on bugs.mysql.com.

[1] http://pastie.org/8092330 (EDIT: The parser wasn't fully correct, use [2])

[2] http://pastie.org/8092403

_mpu• 13 years ago

The speed at which they get regexps out is kind of frightening, I find...

AaronBBrown• 13 years ago

While I agree it has potential to be annoying in some environments, it's also trivially simple to work around.

    for tbl in $(mysql -BNe "SELECT DISTINCT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE EXTRA = 'auto_increment' AND TABLE_SCHEMA = 'mydb'"); do
      mysql -e "ALTER TABLE ${tbl} AUTO_INCREMENT=1" mydb
    done

Run that just after importing your new schema.

Note: That code will require a bit of modification if you make the mistake of having spaces in your table name.

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

The video bringing cake and ice cream to this bug's 7th birthday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAiVsbXVP6k

It's got a real Joker laugh going on toward the end.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

so I see 301+ views on the video and had to go get the obligatory xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/1224/

Also, I wonder why he chose to record it in his bathroom. Those are definitely shower curtains and the echo is definitely bathroom-esque. Maybe for acoustics.

dmourati2• 13 years ago

If any MySQL bug needs a cake it's this whopper I just ran into: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=1341

jeremycole• 13 years ago

That's pretty silly, as any serious installation is generally using innodb_file_per_table, and thus not really subject to this problem.

Nonetheless, it's a lot more complicated than it would seem to "just reclaim the space".

samcrawford• 13 years ago

I disagree that any serious installation is using innodb_file_per_table. It does have downsides.

In our use case we're making very heavy usage of table partitioning (over 500 partitions for some of our very large tables). Because each partition is effectively another table under the covers, if we were to use innodb_file_per_table then we'd have tens of thousands of files. This means a lot more file handles being opened/closed (as well as the obvious ulimit gotchas for the uninitiated). This noticeably hampered query performance when seeking data from random partitions.

dmourati2• 13 years ago

I've managed many non-trivial MySQL installations that didn't set file_per_table. I agree it is a step towards fixing the problem but can create potentially other issues.

Current shop is not running file_per_table, and has little reason to do so at ~30GB database file size. Still, dropping the table and not reclaiming any space was a rude awakening. Combine that the fact that storage was an AWS EBS sized pretty close to its limit (50GB). I could not perform two iterations of a test import without first rm'img the file. Lame.

pud• 13 years ago

Here is the cake: http://youtu.be/oAiVsbXVP6k

bashinator• 13 years ago

Yep, I've been hit by that bug numerous times over the years. Sed works fine for editing the dumps. Happy Birthday!

aylons• 13 years ago

Is this bug still present in the MariaDB fork?

erikkay• 13 years ago

Of all of the things I've done in technology, this was not near the top of the list of things that I thought would be on the top of hacker news (no, I didn't do the cake, just filed the bug 7 years ago).

pagekicker• 13 years ago

I just had occasion to use mysqldump --no-data a few days ago, and then came across this today. Not a good feeling! C'mon, mySQL devs ... fix it already.

An open MySQL bug receives a real Birthday cake

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