The Atlassian article "Connecting JIRA applications to MySQL" needs to be amended so that it instructs the administrator to grant the 'REFERENCES' privilege to the JIRA user.

The current instructions are as follows:

"GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP,ALTER,INDEX on <JIRADB>.* TO '<USERNAME>'@'<JIRA_SERVER_HOSTNAME>' IDENTIFIED BY '<PASSWORD>';

According to the MySQL documentation, "The REFERENCES privilege is unused before MySQL 5.7.6. As of 5.7.6, creation of a foreign key constraint requires the REFERENCES privilege for the parent table."

Omitting the REFERENCES privilege can create problems for plugins that set up foreign-key relationships between entities. It causes exceptions to be thrown:

com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: REFERENCES command denied to user '{blahblah}' for table '{blahblah}'.