Posted on 9 Comments

TYPE= disappears again (MySQL 5.4.4)

I like the 5.4 developments, overall. It has useful stuff and is being developed and released a reasonable pace. Good progress. While perusing the MySQL 5.4.4 changelog, one particular change drew my attention, since it’s been (re)appearing since 2006. It’s the removal of the TYPE= keyword which was obsoleted since MySQL 4.1 in favour of the ENGINE= syntax in CREATE/ALTER TABLE.

While on the surface it may seem ok to remove the obsolete keyword, there are quite a few apps out there that use it, and that cannot be changed. So these will now be unable to use MySQL 5.4 or beyond. I filed this as a bug in 2006, MySQL bug#17501. If you’re interested in the “history of reappearance”, take a peek at the comments and their timeline. I just put in a new comment to note the 5.4.4 change.

I suppose that a new developer comes along and reckon that removing this keyword is a good idea. But really, why do we need to remove one keyword from the parser? Because that’s all it is. And removing it really does break apps.
Let’s not. Again. Please! And this time please put a comment in the parser source files, referring to the bug#, so that it doesn’t get recycled at a later date. Please just leave it in.

Posted on 9 Comments