pt-upgrade fails if select column > 64 chars

Have (or can you) try 2.1.4? If I recall correctly, 2.1.4 has fixes to prevent these kind of printing errors from crashing the tool (the latter one I'm pretty sure of; the former "too long" error maybe not).

Which versions of MySQL are you using? I'm getting a similar error with two 5.1 instances:

Failed to execute query: DBD::mysql::db do failed: Incorrect column name '(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2012-09-16 10:16:36')) / 60' [for Statement "CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE `foo`.`mk_upgrade` AS SELECT (UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2012-09-16 10:16:36')) / 60"] at /Users/daniel/Downloads/percona-toolkit-2.1.3/bin/pt-upgrade line 8766, <$fh> line 1.

Your error and that one probably have the same root cause: the tool is trying to create a temp table with a bad column (ident) name because it doesn't know that that expression isn't an ident and it's not escaping it. Parsing the SQL would help, but that's slow, so I'll have to think more about how to handle such cases.

This might help, in lieu of parsing:

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT (UNIX_TIMESTAMP(NOW()) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2012-09-16 10:16:36')) / 60\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           id: 1
  select_type: SIMPLE
        table: NULL
         type: NULL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
      key_len: NULL
          ref: NULL
         rows: NULL
        Extra: No tables used

If a SELECT doesn't use tables then there's obviously no FROM clause, so whatever follows SELECT must be expressions.

I can recreate the column name (identifier) problem, will fix. The newline problem should be fixed in 2.1.4+.

Chris, this should be fixed. Can you try by downloading pt-upgrade from trunk: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~percona-toolkit-dev/percona-toolkit/2.1/view/head:/bin/pt-upgrade Thanks.

Percona now uses JIRA for bug reports so this bug report is migrated to: https://jira.percona.com/browse/PT-587