Ease of use or consistency

I am working on New features in Performance Schema 5.7 in action tutorial for Percona Live Amsterdam for quite a time already. Probably since version 5.7.3 when instrumentation for metadata locks were introduced and which I presented as a teaser in my combined "General MySQL Troubleshooting" and "Troubleshooting MySQL Performance" seminar I did in South Korea for Oracle University (for 5.6 that time).

In version 5.7.6 instrumentation for variables and status variables were introduced. It supports session, global and user variables. I was very happy to see this addition, especially because originally there was not any duplication in session_variables and global_variables tables. You could simply run query like SELECT * FROM session_status WHERE variable_value>0;  to see list of all status variables which were changed during session. Amazing, isn't it?

But in version 5.7.8 it was fixed. Release notes contain:

When the Performance Schema session variable tables produced output,
they included no rows for global-only variables and thus did not fully
reflect all variable values in effect for the current session. This has
been corrected so that each table has a row for each session variable,
and a row for each global variable that has no session counterpart. This
change applies to the session_variables and session_status tables.

And yes, now session_status table contains such status as innodb_buffer_pool_pages_flushed and session_variables contain innodb_buffer_pool_size as well as all other global-only status and variables which make no sense in session content:

mysql> select * from session_status where variable_name='innodb_buffer_pool_pages_flushed';
+----------------------------------+----------------+
| VARIABLE_NAME                    | VARIABLE_VALUE |
+----------------------------------+----------------+
| Innodb_buffer_pool_pages_flushed | 45             |
+----------------------------------+----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from session_variables where variable_name='innodb_buffer_pool_size';
+-------------------------+----------------+
| VARIABLE_NAME           | VARIABLE_VALUE |
+-------------------------+----------------+
| innodb_buffer_pool_size | 25165824       |
+-------------------------+----------------+
1 row in set, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

Honestly I don't know what to think about this change. I am so unhappy what I created bug report, but I am not sure if it will be fixed and even makes sense.

Of course there is workaround for my one-liner to see all status changes in a session:

select ss.variable_name, ss.variable_value from session_status ss left join global_status gs using(variable_name) where ss.variable_value != gs.variable_value or gs.variable_value is null and ss.variable_value>0;

It is simply longer and harder to write. Probably good idea for sys schema to have views with only-session and only-global status and variables.

What do you think?