MySQL Server 8.0.13: Thanks for the 10 Facebook and Community Contributions

MySQL 8.0.13 was released this week. There are several exciting changes including functional indexes and using general expressions as the default value for your columns. So, I will recommend you to get MySQL 8.0.13 installed and try out the new features. You can read about changed in the release notes section of the MySQL documentation and in Geir's release blog.

However, what I would like to focus on in this blog is the external contributions that has been included in this release. There are five patches contributed by Facebook as well as five contributions from other MySQL users.

The patches contributed by Facebook are:

• The MySQL client library now returns better error messages for OpenSSL errors. (Bug #27855668, Bug #90418)
• The optimizer now supports a Skip Scan access method that enables range access to be used in previously inapplicable situations to improve query performance. For more information, see Skip Scan Range Access Method. (Bug #26976512, Bug #88103)
• A new Performance Schema stage, waiting for handler commit, is available to detect threads going through transaction commit. (Bug #27855592, Bug #90417)
• For mysqldump --tables output, file names now always include a .txt or .sql suffix, even for file names that already contain a dot. Thanks to Facebook for the contribution. (Bug #28380961, Bug #91745)
• Failure to create a temporary table during a MyISAM query could cause a server exit. Thanks to Facebook for the patch. (Bug #27724519, Bug #90145)

Other contributions are:

• Previously, file I/O performed in the I/O cache in the mysys library was not instrumented, affecting in particular file I/O statistics reported by the Performance Schema about the binary log index file. Now, this I/O is instrumented and Performance Schema statistics are accurate. Thanks to Yura Sorokin for the contribution. (Bug #27788907, Bug #90264)
• Performance for locating user account entries in the in-memory privilege structures has been improved. Thanks to Eric Herman for the contribution. (Bug #27772506, Bug #90244)
• InnoDB: A helper class was introduced to improve performance associated with reading from secondary keys when there are multiple versions of the same row. Thanks to Domas Mituzas for the contribution. (Bug #25540277, Bug #84958)
• Replication: When the binlog_group_commit_sync_delay system variable is set to a wait time to delay synchronization of transactions to disk, and the binlog_group_commit_sync_no_delay_count system variable is also set to a number of transactions, the MySQL server exits the wait procedure if the specified number of transactions is reached before the specified wait time is reached. The server manages this process by checking on the transaction count after a delta of one tenth of the time specified by binlog_group_commit_sync_delay has elapsed, then subtracting that interval from the remaining wait time. If rounding during calculation of the delta meant that the wait time was not a multiple of the delta, the final subtraction of the delta from the remaining wait time would cause the value to be negative, and therefore to wrap to the maximum wait time, making the commit hang. The data type for the remaining wait time has now been changed so that the value does not wrap in this situation, and the commit can proceed when the original wait time has elapsed. Thanks to Yan Huang for the contribution. (Bug #28091735, Bug #91055)
• Replication: In code for replication slave reporting, a rare error situation raised an assertion in debug builds, but in release builds, returned leaving a mutex locked. The mutex is now unlocked before returning in this situation. Thanks to Zsolt Parragi for the patch. (Bug #27448019, Bug #89421)

Thanks a lot for the contributions.