Release Early & Release Often

One of the virtues often touted of open source is the idea of “release early & release often.” Eric Raymond documented the Linux kernel team’s use of this approach in detail in his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”

While “release early & release often” is not specifically tied to open source, it is a good practice to keep software in a ready to release state. Microsoft has long used the notion of nightly builds in order to make sure that new check-ins don’t break existing code. (Or that if they do, whoever broke the code is on the hook to fix it.)

At MySQL we have a build team that helps keep our various software products in good shape, but there are often complex code merges across multiple teams required.

We’re recently introduced the idea of “feature preview versions” that enables teams to have a bit more flexibility in releasing software more frequently on the MySQL Forge. The idea is that a team can release something which is a feature version, for example, the recently released MySQL 6.04 preview release of the Falcon storage engine. In this case, the team released this preview version ahead of the normal Beta release and ahead of code merges with other teams. There’s a number of internal improvements in this release of Falcon that improve performance, especially on multi-core, large memory systems.

The feature preview version is not intended as a production release, but it does enable us to continue to release more regularly and ensure that those who want the earliest access to new software can get it, even though it may be a bit rough around the edges. Those who are more conservative can wait until all of the code merges are completed, fully tested across multiple platforms and then officially released as part of the Falcon beta.