Any known issues upgrading from MySQL 5.1.73 to 5.6.21?

Question

I am planning my MySQL DB ver5.1.73 running on a CentOS 6.5 machine to MySQL 5.6.21.

I understand the basic procedure for this based on what I have read on StackOverflow, but I was curious if anyone has encountered any specific problems when they have gone the 5.1 to 5.6 route?

One that I have heard of is that certain TIMESTAMP columns might end up with incorrect timestamps. But I am curious if there are any other ones that people have heard of or run into.

To narrow down on the issues I am concerned about, I am only concerned of anything where there might be data loss or consistency issues

Thanks! IS

Answer 1

ISSUE #1 : Upgrade Path

Your grant tables can get screwed up because you are leaping two versions instead of one.

I just helped someone a week ago because they did just that (MySQL service stops after trying to grant privileges to a user). The solution for that question was to manually fix the mysql.user. Rather than going through that heavy-handed route, there are two ways go about this.

TECHNIQUE #1 : Upgrade the Politically Correct Way

• Upgrade From MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.5
• Run mysql_upgrade --upgrade-system-tables using MySQL 5.5's binaries
• Upgrade From MySQL 5.5 to MySQL 5.6
• Run mysql_upgrade --upgrade-system-tables using MySQL 5.6's binaries
• Generate the System Tables that use InnoDB (See my post InnoDB: Error: Table "mysql"."innodb_table_stats" not found after upgrade to mysql 5.6) since the MySQL 5.6 version of mysql_upgrade does not create them.

TECHNIQUE #2 : Upgrade Directly from MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.6

I already described how to upgrade two versions

• Apr 11, 2013 : MySQL upgrade 5.0.88 to latest (Best Reference)
• Feb 08, 2012 : will replication from 5.5.20 to 5.0.XX server work?
• Jul 26, 2011 : Restoring an old backup to latest MySQL release

ISSUE #2 : FULLTEXT Indexes

If you use FULLTEXT indexes before MySQL 5.6, those tables use the MyISAM Storage Engine. You need to convert those tables to InnoDB (See my post When to switch from MyISAM to InnoDB? under NEED #2). Then, separately tune the InnoDB FULLTEXT options (See my post MySQL FullText search on string shorter than 3 chars returns no rows).

ISSUE #3 : Security Issues

I am sure you are aware of this since you are going straight to MySQL 5.6.21

For the rest who do not know, as of October 16, 2014, Oracle just announced that there are security issues with MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6. This was also announced at Amazon. Both MySQL 5.5.40 and MySQL 5.6.21 will have the security patches in places, so it is best to upgrade to one of these.