Tag Archives: documentation

My Favorite Hidden Docs Page

There’s a lot to love about the MySQL product documentation – a lot of hard work from a number of very talented Oracle staff goes into it (not to mention the helpful suggestions and feedback from the community).  There is, however, one page I find myself coming back to again and again, despite the fact that it’s somewhat hard to find.  This is the MySQL Server options/variable reference page.  It’s a helpful table that lists every MySQL Server option or variable, what version it was introduced or deprecated in, whether it’s dynamic or not, whether variables have session/global/both scope, and links to the version-specific documentation for that variable (useful to know when default values changed, for example).

It always takes me a while to find this page again when I’m looking for it, as it’s outside of the version-specific Server manual.  Maybe you already know about this page and have it bookmarked; if not, give it a look – I find it very useful.  That said, I wish it had filtering capabilities, so I wrote this bug report.  I like being able to quickly answer questions like:

  • Which options were introduced in MySQL 5.6?
  • Which options and variables contain “ssl”?
  • Which options cannot be set dynamically?

There’s a functional but ugly form and working JavaScript code attached to the bug report, if you ever have similar needs.  All it needs is JQuery and the <div> contents that surround the table.