From the very beginning, the default InnoDB transaction isolation level
REPEATABLE READ does not correspond to any well formed definition.
The main issue is the lack of write/write conflict detection.
To fix that and to make REPEATABLE READ correspond to Snapshot Isolation,
b8a671988954870b7db22e20d1a1409fd40f8e3d introduced the Boolean
session variable innodb_snapshot_isolation. It was disabled by default
in order not to break any user applications.
In a new major version of MariaDB Server, we had better enable this
parameter by default.
This essentially reverts commit 4e89ec6692786bc1cbdce64d43d8e85a5d247dab
and only disables InnoDB persistent statistics for tests where it is
desirable. By design, InnoDB persistent statistics will not be updated
except by ANALYZE TABLE or by STATS_AUTO_RECALC.
The internal transactions that update persistent InnoDB statistics
in background tasks (with innodb_stats_auto_recalc=ON) may cause
nondeterministic query plans or interfere with some tests that deal
with other InnoDB internals, such as the purge of transaction history.
InnoDB takes a lot of time to perform null updates. The reason is that
even though an empty update vector was created, InnoDB will go on to
write undo log records and update the system columns
DB_TRX_ID and DB_ROLL_PTR in the clustered index, and of course write
redo log for all this.
This could have been fixed properly in
commit 54a492ecac792a13f374978ba0584d3e7eb9ab77 more than 10 years ago.
