MySQL Previews Upcoming Releases

MySQL plans to launch alpha and beta versions of several new free and open-source software products in September, including a release candidate of the latest version of its database software.

"Were always announcing new open-source products, but this month we just happened to have a lot coming out all at once," said Zack Urlocker, the Uppsala, Sweden-based companys executive vice president. "This includes a release candidate of MySQL 5.1, our core open-source server.

This new version has row-based replication, events, partitioning and disk-based cluster storage as well as faster performance. And theres some new scalability enhancements with the InnoDB storage engine."

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Company officials said four new products —MySQL 5.1 Community Server, the Falcon Database Engine, MySQL Proxy and MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1—are scheduled to be available for download by the end of September.

"Weve also got the new Falcon storage engine in Alpha, which was just released," Urlocker said. "Falcon was designed to take advantage of the many improvements in hardware that are happening now, like multicore CPUs and larger amounts of memory. It will be ideal for Web-based applications. Its still an early Alpha version, and it will be part of a GA release in 2008."

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"Weve also got new Java and ODBC drivers as well as the new MySQL Proxy middleware, which provides some great capabilities for redirecting SQL queries and other advanced features for scale-out," he added.

On Sept. 11, the company announced a major new version of its commercial subscription service, MySQL Enterprise, as well as free, 30-day trial subscriptions for the service. MySQL Enterprise Fall 2007 release is scheduled to be commercially available in the next 30 days, company officials said.

MySQL Enterprise subscribers receive monthly software updates, quarterly service packs, and emergency hot-fix builds, as well as a customizable MySQL Install and Configuration Wizard for a wide range of popular platforms, company officials said.

The service also includes MySQL Enterprise Monitor, which now features a new Replication Monitor, more than 100 Advisor Rules, and a gallery of more than 20 graphs to provide DBAs deeper insight into the security and performance of their distributed database environments.

"We see a lot of users putting MySQL into business critical applications, like e-commerce, reservation systems, publishing systems, telecommunications and so on," Urlocker said. "They want to make sure they are using best practices and getting the most performance possible," he said.

"MySQL Enterprise, with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor, was designed specifically for these types of environments. It provides DBAs with a virtual assistant to help make sure that the servers are performing optimally … [and] it will automatically detect the replication topology and make sure that youre notified, say, if a slave system is responding slowly and falling behind," Urlocker said. "The whole idea is to notify the DBA of problems before they occur," he said.

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