Features and bugs come and go with each release of MySQL, making it tricky for us hobbyists to help each other out when we don’t have the same version installed and observed behavior is a little different for each.
So I installed a dozen versions of MySQL, ranging from 3.23.58 to the current beta, and wrote a script (download below) to send one stream of SQL to each and compare output. Now I can show how identical SQL produces different results.
There’s no reason they have to be different versions; I might run this script against a bunch of identical slaves to check replication status.
I found some unexpected things along the way (who’d have thought the ON clause was so late to join the syntax?) and some silly trivia that just might win me a book someday (table formatted output differs in justification and whitespace between a few of the versions – can you find where?)
Requires the PEAR package Console_Getopt.
