title: Why is innodb's SHOW TABLE STATUS so unreliable?
body: <p>I know that you shouldn't rely on the values returned by InnoDB's SHOW TABLE STATUS.
  In particular, the row count and avg data length.</p>
  
  <p>But I thought maybe it was an accurate value taken at some point, and then innodb only refreshes it during an ANALYZE table or maybe some other infrequent event.</p>
  
  <p>Instead what Im seeing is that I can run a SHOW TABLE STATUS on the same table 5 times in 5 seconds, and just get completely different numbers each time (despite the table not having any insert/delete activity in between)</p>
  
  <p>Where are these values actually coming from? Are they just corrupt in innodb?</p>