Officials at Sun say the MySQL 5.1 open-source database will be generally available in the coming weeks. Sun had said MySQL 5.1 would be available earlier in 2008, but had to delay the release to allow developers to fix bugs.Open-source
database users can expect the final version of MySQL 5.1 to be ready for
general availability in a few weeks, after Sun Microsystems makes sure any
major bugs have been squashed.
"We're just drilling into a couple more areas, just to double-check. My
expectation is that that will be GA in the next couple of weeks," said
Zack Urlocker, vice president of products for Sun's Database Group.
The general availability date for MySQL 5.1 has slipped as developers have
sought to iron out the wrinkles. In April at the MySQL
Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun
officials said the open-source database would be ready within weeks of the
show. However, the process of fixing bugs before declaring it ready has
taken longer than expected, prompting some in the blogosphere
to prod the MySQL community to get more involved.
"A few weeks ago [MySQL's original author] Monty Widenius
asked MySQL developers to help the company decide whether MySQL 5.1 is ready
for GA or not," said Matt Aslett, an analyst with The 451 Group. "Clearly
the company got its fingers burned with both the general release of 5.0 and the
release candidate of 5.1 and is nervous about repeating its mistakes. The fact
that MySQL felt the need to publicly ask the question would suggest that either
it is not confident the bug reporting process has done its job or it is being
overly cautious."
Urlocker said Sun is committed to ensuring that the product is truly ready
to go before putting the general availability stamp on it and officially
recommending it for production use.
"That's precisely [why] we ask people to just bang on it when it's in
the RC [release candidate] stage," Urlocker said. "I actually think
right now there are no known—what we call priority-one [or] priority-two—bugs
that have been reported by customers that are unfixed."
MySQL 5.1 has been in production for roughly three years, and adds a number
of enterprise-class features meant to improve performance,
including row-based replication. The capability replicates the data
changes, as opposed to the actual SQL statements, between a master server and
its slave servers. To increase flexibility, the MySQL team has also added
hybrid replication, which uses either statement-based or row-based replication
depending on the individual SQL operations.
Other enhancements include support for five forms of data partitioning—list,
key, range, hash and subpartitioning—which Urlocker said will help people
dealing with very large data sets.
To Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna, the delays are evidence of "growing
pains" as MySQL expands its presence in and support for high-performance
enterprise environments.
"Actually, 5.1 has been an ambitious project
to support several new enterprise-class features. … Considering that these
are very complex features, it definitely requires considerable development
efforts and testing, especially if they are to be support for large and complex
environments," Yuhanna said.
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