Global / Session

In the variables and status tabs, it's not specified whether you're looking at global or session values.

Once you modify a value, it gets even weirder. It lets you modify a value, and change the target from global to session. If you don't understand what's going on under the hood, this is probably confusing. You edit a global variable, and save it to your session.

My suggestion:

In the variables tab, have two columns instead of one:
* one for global variables
* one for session variables

It would be helpful if the row or text has an alternate color if the two are the different.


If it's hard to show both session and global status/variables, then the GUI should at least specify which of the two you're seeing/editing.

I would not want to add another tab to the myriad of tabs here.

What about displaying 3 instead of two columns, displaying both session and global status?

Variable | Session value | Global value
----------------------------------------
Bla      | 123           | 456
...

Of course that needs two queries instead of one, but that should not eat too much time.

Yeah I basically meant "3 columns in total" when I said "two columns".

I don't know if you can rely on it in all situations, but on all servers that I've tried, the available variables are exactly the same for global and session.
The available status items are exactly the same for global and session as well.

Session and global vars are surely not the same all the time. You can set some session var to some value, leaving the global one on its current value. Manually changing some var is the only situation where both can differ. Probably its sufficient to display the global var in parentheses:

Var-name | <Session-value> (Global-value) | ...

That would save horizontal scrolling space as mostly all globals are the same as session vars.

Ah, actually I was referring to the available variables. They seem to be the same for global and session. However, the values of those variables and status elements greatly differ, even on a fresh new session.

I ran these queries and switched tabs to see the differences:

show session variables ;
show global variables ;
show session status;
show global status;

I can't speak for all users, but I have a strong preference for your first suggestion (separate columns instead of having 2 values crammed into one column). With 2 separate columns it would be more intuitive to edit either a session or a global value.
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Oh, and only slightly related, but if you'll be making changes to the columns; there's a minor usability issue there that I never bothered to report.

On the status tab, the value column is extremely wide, and right-aligned. Without a screenshot it's a bit hard to explain, but try to change the default layout:

XXX|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX|XXX|XXX|

to this layout (which is a lot easier to read):

XXX|XXX|XXX|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

It's not possible, because the value column is autosize, and the rightmost column is right aligned (so its values will -always- be stuck to the right margin).

We have a "global" column since a few days. See here.