MySQL 5.1 released

MySQL 5.1 is now finally GA. It’s taken longer than expected, but we had lots of good input from Sun performance engineers and our Community team who found some bugs a few months back and we decided to go through two more RC candidates to take the super-double-plus safe route.

(Given that the MySQL server is all open source under the GPL, it begs the question as to what a “GA” release means, since the software has been generally available for its entire development cycle. But many of our customers are very conservative when it comes to putting a new database into production, so the GA designation still makes sense.)

We’ve been running MySQL 5.1 pre-release versions in production for more than a year on our web site as well as in many production applications internally. This was part of an overall plan to “eat our own dogfood,” something we had not done consistenly with earlier releases. We weren’t alone in running the release candidate in production though. We had over 200 customers running it in production and I think that speaks to the fact that this is an even higher quality release than MySQL 5.0.

Is it perfect? No, all software has bugs and no doubt there are some cases where we’ve judged a bug as not severe enough to fix right now –typically because it’s a corner case and is unlikely to affect many users, or perhaps it’s got an acceptable work around. In some cases, the fix may require bigger code changes (and more risk) and so it may be slated for a future release.

Nonetheless, I believe 5.1 a solid release and I have no qualms recommending its use for business critical applications. With open source, there’s a higher degree of transparency than with closed source software and are very open with our bug list. So it’s easier to know if you run into a problem whether it’s a bug in our software or something you’re doing incorrectly at the application level. Ultimately, users will download MySQL 5.1 and judge for themselves. I may be biased, but I think its our best release ever. 5.1 has a lot of important capabilities, especially the improved performance and new features like partitioning which helps deal with very large data sets.

Overall, I’m proud of the work of many MySQL Engineers to deliver this release. And thank you to our many users and customers for helping us put it through its paces. (There were 250,000 downloads in the last 10 days, so thank you for the vote of confidence.)

As we move forward, I know we will continue to improve our release processes, and benefit from the input of our users and from additional resources at Sun. I expect there will be some interesting stuff coming out of the labs at Sun as they do more optimization of MySQL in conjunction with Sun servers and storage. It’s exciting to see the collaboration between software engineers and systems guys when they drill down on issues like performance and scalability down to the microcode level. But I’m getting ahead of myself…