MySQL has exceptional track of record by introducing minor fixes that cause major breakages. Though usually I could blame naiveté of engineers, who did not really ever have to deal with production implications, but lately I can start sensing various business implications against open-source offerings.
As an original author of mydumper I really cannot get out of my mind that 5.5 and 5.6 metadata locking changes are there to screw with anyone who is building a backup solution using stable snapshot views of MySQL (for example, mysqldump –single-transaction, the golden standard of backing things up in MySQL world).
As seen in a bug #71017 (palindrome!) filed by my esteemed colleague Eric, newly introduced behaviors gobble all the locks possible, even if it makes absolutely no sense for backup/ETL/migration/etc scenarios.
The only supported way out of that is using MySQL Enterprise Backup, which is proprietary software, and does not produce logical backups that allow selective data restores or ETL capabilities or anything else. You get complete vendor lock in where there is no way to get your data out of the system in a consistent manner, unless, of course, you restrict to “no metadata changes allowed in production” mode.
domas mituzas 