Software update: MySQL 5.5.2 m2

MySQL is a powerful open source database server that is particularly popular as a website and forum database.  The developers have released a new version of the 5.5 development branch. It concerns version 5.5.2 m2 and for more information about the improvements in the 5.5 branch, we refer you to this page. The list of changes from version 5.5.1 is as follows:
Changes in MySQL 5.5.2
InnoDB Plugin Notes:

• This release includes InnoDB Plugin 1.0.6. This version is considered of Release Candidate (RC) quality.

Functionality added or changed:

• Replication: Introduced the –binlog-direct-non-transactional-updates server option. This option causes updates using the statement-based logging format to tables using non-transactional engines to be written directly to the binary log, rather than to the transaction cache. Before using this option, be certain that you have no dependencies between transactional and non-transactional tables. A statement that both selects from an InnoDB table and inserts into a MyISAM table is an example of such a dependency. For more information, see Section 16.1.3.4, “Binary Log Options and Variables”. (Bug#46364) See also Bug#28976, Bug#40116.

Bug fixed:

• Performance: The method for comparing INFORMATION_SCHEMA names and database names was nonoptimal and an improvement was made: When the database name length is already known, a length check is made first and content comparison skipped if the lengths are unequal. (Bug#49501)
• Performance: The MD5() and SHA1() functions had excessive overhead for short strings. (Bug#49491)
• Security Fix: For servers built with yaSSL, a preauthorization buffer overflow could cause memory corruption or a server crash. We thank Evgeny Legerov from Intevydis for providing us with a proof-of-concept script that allowed us to reproduce this bug. (Bug#50227, CVE-2009-4484)
• Incompatible Change: In plugin.h, the MYSQL_REPLICATION_PLUGIN symbol was out of synchrony with its value in MySQL 6.0 because the lower-valued MYSQL_AUDIT_PLUGIN was not present. To correct this, MYSQL_AUDIT_PLUGIN has been added in MySQL 5.5, changing the value of MYSQL_REPLICATION_PLUGIN from 5 to 6. Attempts to load the audit plugin produce an error occurs because only the MYSQL_AUDIT_PLUGIN symbol was added, not the audit plugin itself. This error will go away when the audit plugin is added to MySQL 5.5. Replication plugins from earlier 5.5.x releases must be recompiled against the current release before they will work with the current release. (Bug #49894)
• Important Change: Replication: The RAND() function is now marked as unsafe for statement-based replication. Using this function now generates a warning when binlog_format=STATEMENT and causes the the format to switch to row-based logging when binlog_format=MIXED. This change is being introduced because, when RAND() was logged in statement mode, the seed was also written to the binary log, so the replication slave generated the same sequence of random numbers as was generated on the master. While this could make replication work in some cases, the order of affected rows was still not guaranteed when this function was used in statements that could update multiple rows, such as UPDATE or INSERT … SELECT; if the master and the slave retrieved rows in different order, they began to diverge. (Bug#49222)
• Partitioning: When used on partitioned tables, the records_in_range handler call checked all partitions, rather than the unpruned partitions only. (Bug#48846) See also Bug#37252, Bug#47261.
• Partitioning: When an ALTER TABLE … REORGANIZE PARTITION statement on an InnoDB table failed due to innodb_lock_wait_timeout expiring while waiting for a lock, InnoDB did not clean up any temporary files or tables which it had created. Attempting to reissue the ALTER TABLE statement following the timeout could lead to storage engine errors, or possibly a crash of the server. (Bug#47343)
• Replication: FLUSH LOGS could in some circumstances crash the server. This occurred because the I/O thread could concurrently access the relay log I/O cache while another thread was performing the FLUSH LOGS, which closes and reopens the relay log and, while doing so, initializes (or re-initializes) its I/ Oh cache. This could cause problems if some other thread (in this case, the I/O thread) is accessing it at the same time. Now the thread performing the FLUSH LOGS takes a lock on the relay log before actually flushing it. (Bug#50364)
• Replication: With semisynchronous replication, memory allocated for handling transactions could be freed while still in use, resulting in a server crash. (Bug#50157)
• Replication: In some cases, inserting into a table with many columns could cause the binary log to become corrupted. (Bug#50018) See also Bug#42749.
• Replication: When using row-based replication, setting a BIT or CHAR column of a MyISAM table to NULL, then trying to delete from the table, caused the slave to fail with the error Can’t find record in table. (Bug#49481,Bug#49482)
• Replication: A LOAD DATA INFILE statement that loaded data into a table having a column name that had to be escaped (such as `key` INT) caused replication to fail when logging in mixed or statement mode. In such cases, the master wrote the LOAD DATA event into the binary log without escaping the column names. (Bug#49479) See also Bug#47927.
• Replication: When logging in row-based mode, DDL statements are actually logged as statements; however, statements that affected temporary tables and followed DDL statements failed to reset the binary log format to ROW, with the result that these statements were logged using the statement-based format. Now the state of binlog_format is restored after a DDL statement has been written to the binary log. (Bug#49132)
• Replication: Spatial data types caused row-based replication to crash. (Bug#48776)
• Replication: When using row-based logging, the statement CREATE TABLE t IF NOT EXIST … SELECT was logged as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t IF NOT EXIST … SELECT when t already existed as a temporary table. This was caused by the fact that the temporary table was opened and the results of the SELECT were inserted into it when a temporary table existed and had the same name. Now, when this statement is executed, t is created as a base table, the results of the SELECT are inserted into it — even if there already exists a temporary table having the same name — and the statement is logged correctly. (Bug#47418) See also Bug#47442.
• Replication: Due to a change in the size of event representations in the binary log, when replicating from a MySQL 4.1 master to a slave running MySQL 5.0.60 or later, the START SLAVE UNTIL statement did not function correctly, stopping at the wrong position in the log. Now the slave detects that the master is using the older version of the binary log format, and corrects for the difference in event size, so that the slave stops in the correct position. (Bug#47142)
• Replication: Manually removing entries from the binary log index file on a replication master could cause the server to repeatedly send the same binary log file to slaves. (Bug#28421)
• The SSL certificates in the test suite were about to expire. They have been updated with expiration dates in the year 2015. (Bug#50642)
• SPATIAL indexes were allowed on columns with non-spatial data types, resulting in a server crash for subsequent table inserts. (Bug#50574)
• Index prefixes could be specified with a length greater than the associated column, resulting in a server crash for subsequent table inserts. (Bug#50542)
• Use of loose index scan optimization for an aggregate function with DISTINCT (for example, COUNT(DISTINCT)) could produce incorrect results. (Bug#50539)
• The printstack function does not exist on Solaris 8 or earlier, which would lead to a compilation failure. (Bug#50409)
• A user could see tables in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES without appropriate privileges for them. (Bug#50276)
• Debug output for join structures was garbled. (Bug#50271)
• Within a stored routine, selecting the result of CONCAT_WS() with a routine parameter argument into a user variable could return incorrect results. (Bug#50096)
• The filesort sorting method applied to a CHAR(0) column could lead to a server crash. (Bug#49897)
• EXPLAIN EXTENDED UNION … ORDER BY caused a crash when the ORDER BY referred to a nonconstant or full-text function or a subquery. (Bug#49734)
• Some prepared statements could raise an assertion when re-executed. (Bug#49570)
• sql_buffer_result had an effect on non-SELECT statements, contrary to the documentation. (Bug#49552)
• In some cases a subquery need not be evaluated because it returns only aggregate values ​​that can be calculated from table metadata. This sometimes was not handled by the enclosing subquery, resulting in a server crash. (Bug#49512)
• Mixing full-text searches and row expressions caused a crash. (Bug#49445)
• Creating or dropping a table with 1023 transactions active caused an assertion failure. (Bug#49238)
• mysql-test-run.pl now recognizes the MTR_TESTCASE_TIMEOUT, MTR_SUITE_TIMEOUT, MTR_SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT, and MTR_START_TIMEOUT environment variables. If they are set, their values ​​are used to set the –testcase-timeout, –suite-timeout, –shutdown-timeout, and –start-timeout options, respectively. (Bug#49210)
• Several strmake() calls had an incorrect length argument (too large by one). (Bug#48983)
• On Fedora 12, strmov() did not guarantee correct operation for overlapping source and destination buffer. Calls were fixed to use an overlap-safe version instead. (Bug#48866)
• With one thread waiting for a lock on a table, if another thread dropped the table and created a new table with the same name and structure, the first thread would not notice that the table had been re-created and would try to used cached metadata that belonged to the old table but had been freed. (Bug#48157)
• If an invocation of a stored procedure failed in the table-open stage, subsequent invocations that did not fail in that stage could cause a crash. (Bug#47649)
• A crash occurred when a user variable that was assigned to a subquery result was used as a result field in a SELECT statement with aggregate functions. (Bug#47371)
• When the mysql client was invoked with the –vertical option, it ignored the –skip-column-names option. (Bug#47147)
• If innodb_force_recovery was set to 4 or higher, the server could crash when opening an InnoDB table containing an auto-increment column. MySQL versions 5.1.31 and later were affected. (Bug#46193)
• If EXPLAIN encountered an error in the query, a memory leak occurred. (Bug#45989)
• A race condition on the privilege hash tables allowed one thread to try to delete elements that had already been deleted by another thread. A consequence was that SET PASSWORD or FLUSH PRIVILEGES could cause a crash. (Bug#35589, Bug#35591)
• 1) In rare cases, if a thread was interrupted during a FLUSH PRIVILEGES operation, a debug assertion occurred later due to improper diagnostic area setup. 2) A KILL operation could cause a console error message referring to a diagnostic area state without first ensuring that the state existed. (Bug#33982)
• ALTER TABLE with both DROP COLUMN and ADD COLUMN clauses could crash or lock up the server. (Bug#31145)
• The Table_locks_waited waited variable was not incremented in the cases that a lock had to be waited for but the waiting thread was killed or the request was aborted. (Bug#30331)

 

Version number	5.5.2 m2
Release status	beta
Operating systems	Windows 7, Windows 7 x64, Windows 2000, Linux, BSD, Windows XP, macOS, Solaris, UNIX, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP x64, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows Server 2008
Website	Oracle
Download	http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql
License type	Conditions (GNU/BSD/etc.)