MySQL Protocol Features You Should Be Aware Of

This talk goes over some less used protocol features like Connection Attributes, Query Attributes, Session Tracking and zstd compression.

These features can help you to create better integrations and applications.

Connection Attributes are somewhat more known, but many people don’t know that applications can (and should) add their own information.

And where Connection Attributes are connection based, Query attributes are query based. These are useful today, but they also have the potential to help with future improvements.

And Session Tracking can really help in cases where you write to a primary and then read from a replica. This can give you the GTID from the commit so you can wait for that when reading from the replica. This could replace cases where you would now directly read from the primary to get the read-after-write behavior that you need.

And compression has been in the protocol for a long time, but this was always based on zlib. Now zstandard has entered the picture.