MySQL : the beauty in beta

Beta or not, here we come. Yea, you'd think I'd learn to check out the known bugs list before letting developers/qa have at the new database servers running in the lab with MySQL 5.1.21-b . I mean, how bad could beta really be?

Well, as we should all know, beta is called beta for a reason, but sometimes we open source fanatics tend to jump on board, dealing with issues along the way. This sometimes ends up causing a lot of heartache tracking down issues that turn out to be 'known bugs' in a beta version.

Lesson learned (again) :

Yesterday I received a note from one of our lead developers, that went something like this:

---

It seems that our test mysql instance is very picky about honoring desc versus asc queries (qa confirmed it).

If you run this query it will return in asc regardless of the order by.

select id
from registry_service.ALIAS
where (owner_uri_path_id = 700 and owner_uri_ref='Account/3760')
order by id desc;
----data returned ---
107538
107539
107540
107541
107542

Now if you change the column that you are ordering by, it seems to work…

select name
from registry_service.ALIAS persistent0_
where (owner_uri_path_id = 700 and owner_uri_ref='Account/3760')
order by name desc;
---- data returned----
'7SortAliasTest.20071018.141531980.141'
'7SortAliasTest.20071018.141531980.131'
'3SortAliasTest.20071018.141531980.151'
'0SortAliasTest.20071018.141531980.161'
'0SortAliasTest.20071018.141531980.121'

I’m very confused ; can you help me understand what’s going on?

---

Well it took all of 2 minutes and 1 Google query to get an answer.

Known beta bug ( http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=31001 ).

Just a little foresight on my part could have saved development and test both a lot of hair pulling and time wasted had I evaluated the known bugs list before letting dev and qa have at the new MySQL instance. They could have know that this issue was there, and it would be fixed in the 5.1.22-rc release, which I already have loaded on our new development servers.

Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda...