(this probably applies exactly the same for MySQL and Drizzle… but I’m just speaking about current Drizzle here)

In my current merge request for the embedded-innodb-create-select-transaction-arrgh branch (also see this specific revision), you’ll notice an odd hoop that we have to jump through to make CREATE SELECT statements work with an engine such as InnoDB.

Basically, this is what happens:

• start transaction
• start executing SELECT QUERY (well, prepare executing it and fetch a row)
• create table
• attempt to insert into table

But… we have to do the DDL statement (i.e. the CREATE TABLE) in its own transaction. This means that the outer transaction (running the SELECT) shouldn’t be able to see it. Except it does. We can create a cursor on this table. However, when we try and do something with it (e.g. ib_cursor_first()) we then get the error message DB_MISSING_HISTORY from InnoDB. With a data dictionary that was REPEATABLE READ, we shouldn’t have this problem. However, we don’t have that.

So? What do we do? If we’re in ::write_row and we get an error and we’re running a SQLCOM_CREATE_TABLE sql_command (yes, we get to poke into current_session->lex->sql_command to find this out) we just magically restart the transaction so that we can (properly) see the created table and write rows to it.

This is not a sane part of the interface; it won’t be an issue for many engines but it is needed here.

This blog post (but not the whole blog) is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Attribution is by linking back to this post and mentioning my name (Stewart Smith).