Finally, we do not have any more MySQL 5.6 servers. We upgraded our last part of the system with MySQL 5.6 to 5.7. In our opinion, this upgrade is one of the major referred to MySQL configuration file my.cnf – multiple deprecated directives are removed in this new 5.7 version so when upgrading you should remove them before restarting or starting the new version if you want to have running MySQL server instance.
Keep in mind our my.cnf are old, they are created with MySQL 5.0 and they are edited in every upgrade to a new version (5.0 to 5.1, 5.1 to 5.5, and 5.5 to 5.6), and when we needed a specific optimization for our workload. And this is only for our configuration, there surely are more deprecated/removed variables in the new version. Here is a good starting point – https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html This article is not how to upgrade your old MySQL 5.6 to the new MySQL 5.7 it shows what problems you might have after you upgrade MySQL 5.6 to the new MySQL 5.7.
There are two parts of this article:

1. Removed variables, which were perfectly OK in the old version 5.6
2. Changed default value of variables, which impact greatly the IO or the the SQL execution

The error messages are included, too.

PART 1) Removed variables.

Some MySQL variables first get deprecated and then removed in later versions (some are just renamed) and if they are contained in the my.cnf configuration file your server will not start up at all. The MySQL log shows that the server starts and then throws an error about “unknown variable” and starts a shutdown procedure. So you end up without a database server and it is important to remove them from the configuration or find the new name of a renamed one.

2019-02-26T09:50:12.612950Z 0 [ERROR] unknown variable 'key_buffer=512M'
2019-02-26T09:50:36.361870Z 0 [ERROR] unknown variable 'thread_concurrency=6'
2019-02-26T09:51:17.658546Z 0 [ERROR] unknown variable 'thread_cache=10'
2019-02-26T09:51:32.473210Z 0 [ERROR] unknown variable 'innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=256M'

All four

key_buffer, thread_concurrency, thread_cache, innodb_additional_mem_pool_size

MySQL variables were removed and your server won’t start up if they are contained in the configuration. The “key_buffer” has been renamed to “key_buffer_size“ so replace it with key_buffer_size in your my.cnf. It’s important to replace it, because commenting it out would activate the default value and in this case 8M key_buffer_size, which is pretty low (in fact almost all default values of the MySQL variables are really low and it is a problem and a topic of discussions in many forums).
The “thread_cache” also renamed long ago to “thread_cache_size“, so replace it with thread_cache_size.
thread_concurrency and innodb_additional_mem_pool_size were removed long ago they first stopped doing anything and with this version, they removed the variables. As you can see old configuration files could carry on many old names over the years.

The important thing here is you must rename the ones, which got renamed and remove the ones, which got removed, because your server is not going to start up with them in the configuration.

PART 2) Changed default value

Some default values of MySQL variables got changed and if you have not included it in the my.cnf configuration you might be really surprised how big an impact they have on the IO or even on the behavior of the SQL statements.

2.1) Our first MySQL variables is

sync_binlog

– the default value was “0” (deactivated synchronization) and now it is “1” (bin log synchronization). This could greatly impact the performance of your MySQL database server with like 8-10 times more writes and IO disk wait time (really!!!) – you can see it here: (coming soon). So if you haven’t used this variable before you should put it in your my.cnf configuration for sure (in [mysqld] section):

sync_binlog=0

do not need to restart the server, just put in the my.cnf configuration file and open a mysql root console and execute:

SET GLOBAL sync_binlog=0;

it can be live changed.

2.2) And the second example is

sql_mode

– the default value was “NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION” and now it is “ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION”, which is a pretty substantial difference. You can lose INSERTs and UPDATEs easily because a much strict mode is activated by default.
For example, with an INSERT if you do not set the value to a field, which column does not have a default value (yes, it is wrong, but it was OK before), your insert won’t be executed and you’ll get an error (or just a FALSE after execution of your query like with PHP PDO). Here is the MySQL explanation:

A value is missing when a new row to be inserted does not contain a value for a non-NULL column that has no explicit DEFAULT clause in its definition.

And more in https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/sql-mode.html#sql-mode-strict
So if you haven’t used this variable before you should put it in your my.cnf configuration for sure (in [mysqld] section):

sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

do not need to restart the server, just put in the my.cnf configuration file and open a MySQL root console and execute:

SET GLOBAL sql_mode='NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION'