There are some things that we in MariaDB are not happy with in MySQL/Oracle's implementation of EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON.

The most important issues are already fixed in MariaDB's EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON implementation. See EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON Differences From MySQL for details.

This page lists things are are not fixed yet.

Higher priority

• Better display for ORDER/GROUP BY (MDEV-6995)
• Better display for Batched Key Access plans (Plain join buffering is fixed already)

Nice to have

Show ranges being scanned

Currently, one can only find the ranges produced by the range optimizer by looking into optimizer_trace. It would be nice if EXPLAIN showed them, too

MySQL [dbt3sf1]> explain format=json select * from customer where c_acctbal < -1000 \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
EXPLAIN: {
  "query_block": {
    "select_id": 1,
    "table": {
      "table_name": "customer",
      "access_type": "range",
      "possible_keys": [
        "c_acctbal",
        "i_c_acctbal_nationkey"
      ],
      "key": "c_acctbal",
      "used_key_parts": [
        "c_acctbal"
      ],
      "key_length": "9",
      "rows": 1,
      "filtered": 100,
      "index_condition": "(`dbt3sf1`.`customer`.`c_acctbal` < -(1000))"
    }
  }
}

Low priority

Filesort/priority queue

Neither version of EXPLAIN in 5.6 shows the "filesort with small limit" optimization. See MDEV-6430.