868867 - Bump MySQL minimum requirement to 5.5.8 to support 4-bytes Unicode characters (utf8mb4)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Database, enhancement)

Description

[Frédéric Buclin]

Per bug 405011 comment 13, MySQL 5.5.3 is required to support Unicode characters above U+FFFF. The first stable release on this branch is 5.5.8 and so is the version we should require.

Unfortunately, RHEL5 has MySQL 5.0.95, and RHEL6 has MySQL 5.1.66. So it looks like we won't be able to require MySQL 5.5.8 before Bugzilla 5.2 at the earliest.

Comment 1

[Brandon Johnson [:cyborgshadow]]

Default yum repo's for MySQL on RHEL6 contain 5.5.

https://blogs.oracle.com/MySQL/entry/mysql_5_5_available_on

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

RHEL 7 will have MariaDB 5.5.31.  It's due out "first half of 2014" but the writing on the wall says probably not until after RH Summit, which is in April.  It went into beta in December 2013.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

justdave: are you saying that we can't require MySQL 5.5 or greater until RHEL 7 is released?

Even when RHEL 7 is released, people may not want to upgrade their machines immediately. Is there a 5.5-on-RHEL6 solution we can promote to break this dependency?

Upgrading to 5.5 allows us to get rid of the utf-8 parameter (bug 902395).

Gerv

Comment 4

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

We're landing bug 405011 because not enough distributions are shipping a new enough version for this to be a viable upgrade path yet.  So once that condition is met, converting the affected data back will be part of the consideration when we fix this.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #3)
> Even when RHEL 7 is released, people may not want to upgrade their machines
> immediately. Is there a 5.5-on-RHEL6 solution we can promote to break this
> dependency?

Two years later, things have changed a bit. :) Bugzilla 6.0 requires Perl 5.14, which is available in RHEL7 but not in RHEL6. So people who want to install Bugzilla 6.0 on RHEL will have to install RHEL7 anyway. So we can safely ignore those still running RHEL6 in this bug.

Comment 7

[Frédéric Buclin]

For the record, utf8mb4 support requires DBD::mysql 4.032, released on 2015-07-20.

Comment 8

[Dylan Hardison [:dylan] (he/him)]

Doing this will also require innodb tables to support the newer barracuda format and have the large prefix option enabled.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_large_prefix

Comment 9

[tangmu]

The importance should be changed from "enhancement" to "critical", since this bug causes loss of data. Since before the turn of the century, it's been a violation of the Unicode standard to destroy data simply because it contains code points beyond U+FFFF.

Is there any remaining difficulty with switching to utf8mb4 and innodb?

Comment 10

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

bug 1253535 is specific to bugzilla.mozilla.org, and comment 46 [1] has some of the requirements to get it working (MySQL 5.7, DYNAMIC/COMPRESSED row formats, innodb_large_prefix setting).

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1253535#c46

Comment 11

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Fixed on Harmony: (MySQL >= 5.6.12, MariaDB >= 10.0.5, DBD::Mysql >= 4.032)
https://github.com/bugzilla/harmony/commit/1bd5d7d1b86d3d6470552ba4979d850377977864

Fixed on 5.2: (MySQL >= 5.6.12, MariaDB >= 10.0.5, DBD::Mysql >= 4.032)
https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla/commit/35a060cbd9d880541ad7e6c02710c0c3647a3b19