jcole’s weblog

Last month I blogged about the silly changes to the default for the SHOW STATUS command in MySQL 5.0 in Stop the madness: SHOW STATUS, and I filed MySQL Bug #19093: SHOW STATUS defaults to SESSION.

Well, it looks like Monty has spoken and this will not be fixed. That’s unfortunate, but oh well, I tried.

You can read the full text of Monty’s reply in the bug report itself, but his reasons for supporting the current behaviour boil down to:

• It’s similar to what SHOW VARIABLES does. — Yes, this is true, but neither commands’ output makes sense, really. If you do SHOW [SESSION] STATUS, you get a mix of session-scoped and global-scoped results back, and there’s no way to tell which is which. Same goes for SHOW [SESSION] VARIABLES. Ugh.
• MySQL 5.0 is considered “stable” now, so it’s bad to change it now. — I agree on this part, it’s bad form to change it now, but at the same time, very few people are really using 5.0, so this is in fact a good time to change it, before people find out that it’s broken.
• MySQL’s documentation has long suggested that people use FLUSH STATUS and SHOW STATUS to find out how query was executed, which kind of works now. — Yes, the manual has suggested this, and a few people have made limited use of it, but come on, it’s impossible to use this in production, and it’s only even of limited value on a test server.

I suggested a compromise: To add a Scope column to the output of the SHOW STATUS and SHOW VARIABLES commands, which would indicate the scope of the value seen in the output. What do you think?