MySQL 5.6.16 Community Release Notes

Thank you to the MySQL Community, on behalf of the MySQL team @ Oracle. Your bug reports, testcases and patches have helped create a better MySQL 5.6.16.

In particular:

• Thanks to Honza Horak for suggesting we make tmpdir configurable at build-time, and for providing a patch. Bug #68338.
• Thanks to Hartmut Holzgraefe for reporting a memory leak when using the InnoDB memcached API and replication. Bug #70757.
• Thanks to Justin Swanhart for reporting that InnoDB reported an incorrect operating system error code when it failed to initialize. Bug #70867.
• Thanks to Yoshinori Matsunobu who reported that MySQL 5.6’s persistent InnoDB statistics caused stalls due to latch contention. Bug #70768.
• Thanks to Laurynas Biveinis for discovering that InnoDB could needlessly call os_thread_get_curr_id(). Bug #70417.
• Thanks to Nizameddin Ordulu for identifying a case where InnoDB’s doublewrite buffer would not restore corrupted pages but could have. Bug #70087.
• Thanks to Hartmut Holzgraefe for reporting that the README file for InnoDB memcached incorrectly specified the version of libevent statically linked. Bug #70034.
• Thanks to Shahriyar Rzayev for reporting that the error message when reseting a slave with innodb_force_recovery set was cryptic. We have since improved the error message. Bug #69907.
• Thanks to Keith Dechant for reporting that AUTO_INCREMENT values could not be reset when the INPLACE algorithm was used for ALTER TABLE. Bug #69882.
• Thanks to Laurynas Biveinis for reporting an incorrect comment in the InnoDB source code. Bug #69847.
• Thanks to Christian Rabe for reporting a problem when using an InnoDB tablespace stored on a raw device. Bug #69424.
• Thanks to Justin Swanhart for reporting that an online ALTER TABLE operation on a partitioned table can consume a significant amount of memory. Bug #69325.
• Thanks to Valeriy Kravchuk for reporting a specific workload where InnoDB did not scale well on multi-core machines. In response to Valeriy’s bug report, we added a new feature to use atomic reference counting to track page use instead of mutexes. Bug #68079.
• Thanks to Stewart Smith for reporting that table renaming operations showed up under foreign key errors in SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS. Stewart also generously provided a patch. Bug #61746.
• Thanks to Laurynas Biveinis for reporting that UNIV_SYNC_DEBUG was disabled erroneously as part of an earlier bug fix. We’ve since reenabled it. Bug #69617.
• Thanks to Joffrey Michaie for reporting a situation where queries on tables partitioned by hash could return wrong results. Bug #70588.
• Thanks to zhai weixiang for reporting an issue where binlog dump information could incorrectly be written to the error log. Bug #70685.
• Thanks to Justin Swanhart for reporting that mysqlbinlog did not properly decode DECIMAL values. Bug #65812.
• Thanks to Santosh Praneeth Banda for reporting that the semisynchronous replication plugin was called twice for a DDL statement. Bug #70410.
• Thanks to Yang Dingning from NCNIPC, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences for reporting a security issue. Bug #61065.
• Thanks to Bryan Turner for reporting a situation where tables with utf8_bin collation could return results in the wrong order. Bug #69005.
• Thanks to Honza Horak for reporting code improvement suggestions as the result of a coverity analysis. Bug #70830.
• Thanks to Ed Reeder for reporting that the option --local-service did not work on Windows. Bug #69637.
• Thanks to David Coyle for reporting a limitation when using views with an ORDER BY in their definition. We have since worked around this limitation. Bug #69678.
• Thanks to Davi Arnaut for reporting an issue with the performance_schema instrumentation interface. Bug #70628.
• Thanks to Laurynas Biveinis for pointing out a situation where make_atomic_cas_body64 might be miscompiled. Thanks also to Davi Arnaut for his comments on the bug. Bug #63451.
• Thanks to Davi Arnaut for reporting that the mysql_plugin client inadvertently attempts to remove files. Bug #69752.
• Thanks to Igor Babaev and xiaobin lin who independently discovered a case when COUNT(DISTINCT) could return wrong results. xiaobin lin also provided a patch, which while we did not end up using it, we valued the contribution. Bug #68749, Bug #71028.
• Thanks to Patrick Middleton for pointing out an issue when trying to compile MySQL without partitioning. While we didn’t end up using it, we thank Patrick for also providing a patch. Bug #71010.
• Thanks to Anthony Tso for reporting a bug where wrong results could be returned. Bug #70608.
• Thanks to Elena Stepanova for reporting a security issue. Bug #68751.
• Thanks to Daniel van Eeden for letting us know that some scripts provided out of date information regarding where to file bug reports. Bug #68742.
• Thanks to Don Coffin for reporting that some file removal operations were not instrumented by performance_schema. Bug #69782.
• Thanks to Eric Bergen for reporting that mysqldump would not release metadata locks until after the dump operation had finished. Bug #71017.
• Thanks to Michael Ezzell for reporting a security issue. Bug #68354.
• Thanks to Giuseppe Maxia for raising awareness of the obsolete mysqlbug utility. We have since removed mention of it from mysql_install_db. Bug #29716.

Thank you again to all the community contributors listed above. In particular, the MySQL team would like to call out the names that appear more than once in this release:

Honza Horak (2), Hartmut Holzgraefe (2), Justin Swanhart (3), Davi Arnaut (2) and Laurynas Biveinis (4).

If I missed a name here, please let me know!

- Morgan