MySQL Bugs: #22888: Shown row count changes

Bug #22888	Shown row count changes
Submitted:	2 Oct 2006 11:57	Modified:	24 Mar 2009 15:12
Reporter:	Andreas Påhlsson (Basic Quality Contributor)	Email Updates:
Status:	Won't fix	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Administrator	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	1.2.3rc	OS:	Any
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
When selecting a database in the Schemata pane the tables and their properties in the database are shown. Among these are the Rows column. If I select another database and then select the first database again, the Rows column displays different data.

This seams to be related to the fact that the tables are of the InnoDB type and have couple of hundred rows in them.

How to repeat:
This might be hard to reproduce. I hope you can.

Start MySQL Administrator.
Select Catalogs in the left pane.
Select a database with InnoDB tables.
Observe Rows column.
Select another database.
Select the first database again.
Observe Rows column changes.

Suggested fix:
Make the Rows column display consistant data.

Thank you for the bug report. That behavior is a documented restriction of
InnoDB engine:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-restrictions.html

"SHOW TABLE STATUS does not give accurate statistics on InnoDB tables, except for the physical size reserved by the table. The row count is only a rough estimate used in SQL optimization."

If this is indeed the expected behaviour from a technical view point, it's definitly not an expected behaviour from a users perspective. Please rename the column "Estimated Rows" to enlighten the user about this behaviour.

If this is indeed the expected behaviour from a technical view point, it's definitly not a expected behaviour from a user perspective. Please rename the column "Estimated Rows" to enlighten the user about this behaviour.

If this is indeed the expected behaviour from a technical view point, it's definitly not an expected behaviour from a users perspective. Please rename the column "Estimated Rows" to enlighten the user about this behaviour.

Thank you for the feedback. Since this is a behavior of the InnoDB engine
and not the MySQL Administrator I am changing to feature request to add
a note about in the mentioned screen.

Bug http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=23996 was marked as duplicate of
this one

I think this is crazy.  You cannot deal with "approximates" in databases!!! ... Unless you want to change the column to read something like ">10" >100 >1000 >10000" etc that'd make sense.  Even then it'd not be reliable, i have a table with 250 rows in it, the admin has reported numbers as low as 40 and as many as 450 within a few seconds of each other! 

If the current way of getting the totals is not reliable I think it should either be removed from the information, changed to display the way I suggested above or changed to do whatever is necessary to get accurate numbers, e.g. run a "select count(*)" on each table.

I thought InnoDB was supposed to be more advanced that MyISAM but MyISAM doesn't have this problem!

Bug #26001 was marked as duplicate of this one

Many thanks for writing a bug report. We are on the way to implement full functionality of MySQL Administrator into MySQL Workbench. We won't add this feature request anymore.

More informations about MySQL Workbench you will find here:

http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/