MySQL Readies Release Candidate For 5.1 168
Anonymous Dolphin writes "MySQL has released plans for a final RC for the MySQL 5.1 server. Monty Widenius, the CTO and founder of MySQL, has put up a request for more feedback from the community. You can get the latest RC here. Please help with the testing of 5.1 and report your bugs here."
Hosting providers (Score:3, Interesting)
XML Functions (Score:4, Interesting)
First release with native XML functions. If there's indexing behind some of the XPath, this could be a very interesting release indeed.
I'd definitely be interested to hear what it's also missing that more XML aware databases include, though.
Re:Hosting providers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hosting providers (Score:4, Interesting)
Hosting providers that are worth their weight will typically use external MySQL (clusters) and offer various versions. They've learned the painful lesson that running a bunch of over-allocating services that are open to the world on one box only leads to customers canceling due to down time.
For instance, the $20 I pay a month gets me access to 4.x and 5.x, each version being its own shared cluster.
Re:Do people trust this project anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was interesting to see Sun's reaction.
Apparently, MySQL AB (prior to purchase) were the ones contemplating making the move to more proprietary tools. It was set in motion and left on the table, then Sun purchased them.
Sun basically said "We have no need to put this in play, we don't make our money from a single product like MySQL AB did .."
A lot of people Criticized Sun for the idea, however the idea was the brainstorm of MySQL AB, not Sun.
Yeah, but does it have sub second Timestamps? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to use MySQL instead of Postgres - it's easier for me to install, maintain, and just plain understand. I don't like how PG does things a lot of the time and find it needlessly complex. But because MySQL lacks the seemingly basic ability to store a timestamp with better than second accuracy, I can't, because I have to store log events which are often more than one a second - much more - and I need to know exactly when. Milliseconds would be fine, microseconds would be great.
MySQL currently recommends some ridiculous hack where you strip the sub-second information from the time you send it and store it in another column, then write some kind of view which combines them back. What? I am not doing that to implement what I consider to be basic functionality! Do you remember how my motivation for switching is because I want things to be simple? Writing weird multi-column time recombination hacks is not my idea of simple.
Replication improvements, XML parsing, great features all - but please just give us timestamps with accuracy better than a second? A lot can and does happen in less than a second and I need to be able to log it with accuracy!
Triggers (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing that I look forward to in 5.1 is the addition of triggers for non-root users. I've fought many a battles with hosting providers wanting to charge me upwards of $120/hr to put my triggers in place as root because MySQL didn't allow regular users to run it.
Now, finding a hosting service willing to upgrade to 5.1 within a year after it's released is going to be a new bat
Re:nice feature set (Score:2, Interesting)
How about we fix the obvious too? This bug [mysql.com] makes it impossible to have an Insert trigger and an update trigger both updating a table. Trying to do so triggers database duplicate keys because there isn't a good lock on the auto-inc value.
A bug, marked as serious and yet left pending since Feb'07 !
BTW, here are the 3+ year old bug reports (Score:2, Interesting)
"Official" one from Feb 2005:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=8523 [mysql.com]
And here's another one going back to Nov 2003, which was strangely marked as a dupe of the above:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=1764 [mysql.com]
Should have put those in the original comment; apologies for my laziness.
Re:Hosting providers (Score:2, Interesting)
A growing collection of well designed web applications require MySQL 5.x
Let me start by saying that I agree with you. It would be great if hosting providers could give us a bit more choice.
Now I'd like to disagree with just the bit of your statement that I've quoted. By definition, a "well designed" web application can never *require* MySQL 5.x. Well designed web application have abstraction layers and don't care whether you use MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and so on. If web programmers built a proper abstraction layer into their apps, they could support MySQL x.y along with all the other versions of MySQL with little added effort.
Re:Do people trust this project anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also your view of MySQL is a couple years old. MySQL has made leaps and bounds on Postgres. Now that mysql has things like PL/SQL and Foreign Keys the differences between it and postgres have dwindled.
Disclaimer: I have a strong Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL background. I find them all to be excellent tools.