MySQL Cluster 7.4.16 has been released

[Prashant Tekriwal]

Dear MySQL Users,

MySQL Cluster is the distributed, shared-nothing variant of MySQL.
This storage engine provides:

  - In-Memory storage - Real-time performance
  - Transparent Auto-Sharding - Read & write scalability
  - Active-Active/Multi-Master geographic replication
  - 99.999% High Availability with no single point of failure
    and on-line maintenance
  - NoSQL and SQL APIs (including C++, Java, http, Memcached
    and JavaScript/Node.js)

MySQL Cluster 7.4 makes significant advances in performance;
operational efficiency (such as enhanced reporting and faster restarts
and upgrades) and conflict detection and resolution for active-active
replication between MySQL Clusters.

MySQL Cluster 7.4.16 has been released and can be downloaded from

  http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/

where you will also find Quick Start guides to help you get your
first MySQL Cluster database up and running.

The release notes are available from

  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql-cluster/7.4/en/index.html

MySQL Cluster enables users to meet the database challenges of next
generation web, cloud, and communications services with uncompromising
scalability, uptime and agility.

More details can be found at

  http://www.mysql.com/products/cluster/

Enjoy !

==============================================================================
Changes in MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4.16 (5.6.37-ndb-7.4.16) (2017-07-18)

   MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4.16 is a new release of MySQL NDB
   Cluster 7.4, based on MySQL Server 5.6 and including features
   in version 7.4 of the NDB storage engine, as well as fixing
   recently discovered bugs in previous NDB Cluster releases.

   Obtaining MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4.  MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4
   source code and binaries can be obtained from
   http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/.

   For an overview of changes made in MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4, see
   What is New in NDB Cluster 7.4
(http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-cluster-what-is-new-7-4.html).

   This release also incorporates all bugfixes and changes made
   in previous NDB Cluster releases, as well as all bugfixes and
   feature changes which were added in mainline MySQL 5.6
   through MySQL 5.6.37 (see Changes in MySQL 5.6.37 (Not yet
   released, General Availability)
(http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.6/en/news-5-6-37.html)).

     * Functionality Added or Changed

     * Bugs Fixed

   Functionality Added or Changed

     * NDB Replication: Added the --ndb-log-update-minimal
       option for logging by mysqld. This option causes only
       primary key values to be written in the before image, and
       only changed columns in the after image. (Bug #24438868)

     * Added the --diff-default option for ndb_config. This
       option causes the program to print only those parameters
       having values that differ from their defaults. (Bug
       #85831, Bug #25844166)

     * Added the --query-all option to ndb_config. This option
       acts much like the --query option except that --query-all
       (short form: -a) dumps configuration information for all
       attributes at one time. (Bug #60095, Bug #11766869)

   Bugs Fixed

     * NDB Replication: Added a check to stop an NDB replication
       slave when configuration as a multi-threaded slave is
       detected (for example, if slave_parallel_workers is set
       to a nonzero value). (Bug #21074209)

     * NDB Cluster APIs: The implementation method
       NdbDictionary::NdbTableImpl::getColumn(), used from many
       places in the NDB API where a column is referenced by
       name, has been made more efficient. This method used a
       linear search of an array of columns to find the correct
       column object, which could be inefficient for tables with
       many columns, and was detected as a significant use of
       CPU in customer applications. (Ideally, users should
       perform name-to-column object mapping, and then use
       column IDs or objects in method calls, but in practice
       this is not always done.) A less costly hash index
       implementation, used previously for the name lookup, is
       reinstated for tables having relatively many columns. (A
       linear search continues to be used for tables having
       fewer columns, where the difference in performance is
       neglible.) (Bug #24829435)

     * MySQL NDB ClusterJ: The JTie and NDB JTie tests were
       skipped when the unit tests for ClusterJ were being run.
       (Bug #26088583)

     * Backup .log files contained log entries for one or more
       extra fragments, due to an issue with filtering out
       changes logged by other nodes in the same node group.
       This resulted in a larger .log file and thus use of more
       resources than necessary; it could also cause problems
       when restoring, since backups from different nodes could
       interfere with one another while the log was being
       applied. (Bug #25891014)

     * When making the final write to a redo log file, it is
       expected that the next log file is already opened for
       writes, but this was not always the case with a slow
       disk, leading to node failure. Now in such cases NDB
       waits for the next file to be opened properly before
       attempting to write to it. (Bug #25806659)

     * Data node threads can be bound to a single CPU or a set
       of CPUs, a set of CPUs being represented internally by
       NDB as a SparseBitmask. When attempting to lock to a set
       of CPUs, CPU usage was excessive due to the fact that the
       routine performing the locks used the
       mt_thr_config.cpp::do_bind() method, which looks for bits
       that are set over the entire theoretical range of the
       SparseBitmask (2^32-2, or 4294967294). This is fixed by
       using SparseBitmask::getBitNo(), which can be used to
       iterate over only those bits that are actually set,
       instead. (Bug #25799506)

     * A bulk update is executed by reading records and
       executing a transaction on the set of records, which is
       started while reading them. When transaction
       initialization failed, the transaction executor function
       was subsequently unaware that this had occurred, leading
       to SQL node failures. This issue is fixed by providing
       appropriate error handling when attempting to initialize
       the transaction. (Bug #25476474)
       References: See also: Bug #20092754.

     * Setting NoOfFragmentLogParts such that there were more
       than 4 redo log parts per local data manager led to
       resource exhaustion and subsequent multiple data node
       failures. Since this is an invalid configuration, a check
       has been added to detect a configuration with more than 4
       redo log parts per LDM, and reject it as invalid. (Bug
       #25333414)

     * Execution of an online ALTER TABLE ... REORGANIZE
       PARTITION statement on an NDB table having a primary key
       whose length was greater than 80 bytes led to restarting
       of data nodes, causing the reorganization to fail. (Bug
       #25152165)

     * Error 240 is raised when there is a mismatch between
       foreign key trigger columns and the values supplied to
       them during trigger execution, but had no error message
       indicating the source of the problem. (Bug #23141739)
       References: See also: Bug #23068914, Bug #85857.

     * If the number of LDM blocks was not evenly divisible by
       the number of TC/SPJ blocks, SPJ requests were not
       equally distributed over the available SPJ instances. Now
       a round-robin distribution is used to distribute SPJ
       requests across all available SPJ instances more
       effectively.
       As part of this work, a number of unused member variables
       have been removed from the class Dbtc. (Bug #22627519)

     * ALTER TABLE .. MAX_ROWS=0 can now be performed only by
       using a copying ALTER TABLE statement. Resetting MAX_ROWS
       to 0 can no longer be performed using ALGORITHM=INPLACE
       or the ONLINE keyword. (Bug #21960004)

     * During a system restart, when a node failed due to having
       missed sending heartbeats, all other nodes reported only
       that another node had failed without any additional
       information. Now in such cases, the fact that heartbeats
       were missed and the ID of the node that failed to send
       heartbeats is reported in both the error log and the data
       node log. (Bug #21576576)

     * The planned shutdown of an NDB Cluster having more than
       10 data nodes was not always performed gracefully. (Bug
       #20607730)

     * Due to a previous issue with unclear separation between
       the optimize and execute phases when a query involved a
       GROUP BY, the join-pushable evaluator was not sure
       whether its optimized query execution plan was in fact
       pushable. For this reason, such grouped joins were always
       considered not pushable. It has been determined that the
       separation issue has been resolved by work already done
       in MySQL 5.6, and so we now remove this limitation. (Bug
       #86623, Bug #26239591)

     * When deleting all rows from a table immediately followed
       by DROP TABLE, it was possible that the shrinking of the
       DBACC hash index was not ready prior to the drop. This
       shrinking is a per-fragment operation that does not check
       the state of the table. When a table is dropped, DBACC
       releases resources, during which the description of the
       fragment size and page directory is not consistent; this
       could lead to reads of stale pages, and undefined
       behavior.
       Inserting a great many rows followed by dropping the
       table should also have had such effects due to expansion
       of the hash index.
       To fix this problem we make sure, when a fragment is
       about to be released, that there are no pending expansion
       or shrinkage operations on this fragment. (Bug #86449,
       Bug #26138592)

     * The internal function execute_signals() in mt.cpp read
       three section pointers from the signal even when none was
       passed to it. This was mostly harmless, although
       unneeded. When the signal read was the last one on the
       last page in the job buffer, and the next page in memory
       was not mapped or otherwise accessible, ndbmtd failed
       with an error. To keep this from occurring, this function
       now only reads section pointers that are actually passed
       to it. (Bug #86354, Bug #26092639)

     * The ndb_show_tables program --unqualified option did not
       work correctly when set to 0 (false); this should disable
       the option and so cause fully qualified table and index
       names to be printed in the output. (Bug #86017, Bug
       #25923164)

     * When an NDB table with foreign key constraints is
       created, its indexes are created first, and then, during
       foreign key creation, these indexes are loaded into the
       NDB dictionary cache. When a CREATE TABLE statement
       failed due to an issue relating to foreign keys, the
       indexes already in the cache were not invalidated. This
       meant that any subsequent CREATE TABLE with any indexes
       having the same names as those in the failed statement
       produced inconsistent results. Now, in such cases, any
       indexes named in the failed CREATE TABLE are immediately
       invalidated from the cache. (Bug #85917, Bug #25882950)

     * Attempting to execute ALTER TABLE ... ADD FOREIGN KEY
       when the key to be added had the name of an existing
       foreign key on the same table failed with the wrong error
       message. (Bug #85857, Bug #23068914)

     * The node internal scheduler (in mt.cpp) collects
       statistics about its own progress and any outstanding
       work it is performing. One such statistic is the number
       of outstanding send bytes, collected in
       send_buffer::m_node_total_send_buffer_size. This
       information may later be used by the send thread
       scheduler, which uses it as a metric to tune its own send
       performance versus latency.
       In order to reduce lock contention on the internal send
       buffers, they are split into two thr_send_buffer parts,
       m_buffer and m_sending, each protected by its own mutex,
       and their combined size repesented by
       m_node_total_send_buffer_size.
       Investigation of the code revealed that there was no
       consistency as to which mutex was used to update
       m_node_total_send_buffer_size, with the result that there
       was no consurrency protection for this value. To avoid
       this, m_node_total_send_buffer_size is replaced with two
       values, m_buffered_size and m_sending_size, which keep
       separate track of the sizes of the two buffers. These
       counters are updated under the protection of two
       different mutexes protecting each buffer individually,
       and are now added together to obtain the total size.
       With concurrency control established, updates of the
       partial counts should now be correct, so that their
       combined value no longer accumulates errors over time.
       (Bug #85687, Bug #25800933)

     * Dropped TRANS_AI signals that used the long signal format
       were not handled by the DBTC kernel block. (Bug #85606,
       Bug #25777337)
       References: See also: Bug #85519, Bug #27540805.

     * To prevent a scan from returning more rows, bytes, or
       both than the client has reserved buffers for, the DBTUP
       kernel block reports the size of the TRANSID_AI it has
       sent to the client in the TUPKEYCONF signal it sends to
       the requesting DBLQH block. DBLQH is aware of the maximum
       batch size available for the result set, and terminates
       the scan batch if this has been exceeded.
       The DBSPJ block's FLUSH_AI attribute allows DBTUP to
       produce two TRANSID_AI results from the same row, one for
       the client, and one for DBSPJ, which is needed for key
       lookups on the joined tables. The size of both of these
       were added to the read length reported by the DBTUP
       block, which caused the controlling DBLQH block to
       believe that it had consumed more of the available
       maximum batch size than was actually the case, leading to
       premature termination of the scan batch which could have
       a negative impact on performance of SPJ scans. To correct
       this, only the actual read length part of an API request
       is now reported in such cases. (Bug #85408, Bug
       #25702850)

     * When compiling the NDB kernel with gcc version 6.0.0 or
       later, it is now built using -flifetime-dse=1. (Bug
       #85381, Bug #25690926)

On Behalf of Oracle/MySQL Release Engineering Team
Prashant Tekriwal