First MySQL 5.5 Beta Released

joabj writes "While MySQL is the subject of much high-profile wrangling between the EU and Oracle (and the MySQL creator himself), the MySQL developers have been quietly moving the widely-used database software forward. The new beta version of MySQL, the first publicly available, features such improvements as near-asynchronous replication and more options for partitioning. A new release model has been enacted as well, bequeathing this version the title of 'MySQL Server 5.5.0-m2.' Downloads here."

Troll, I know, but wrong decade.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

If you look at the current state of data storage, the new trend is for *less* features and for more speed, concurrency, throughput and *eventual consistency*. So not supporting strict ACID and/or parts of ANSI SQL can allow databases to perform faster. Really depends on what you want to do with your data. No more one-size fits all db anymore. Even Oracle has different versions ( with a huge variance in price) for different use cases.

So depending on your use case, you can still make fun of it for not sup

Re:

[GooberToo]

Exactly! Especially since MySQL is already well known for both data loss and corruption in the name of performance. Made all the more embarrassing is that PostgreSQL consistently either meets or beats MySQL in performance and leaves it far behind in scalability. In short, PostgreSQL is literally the poster boy proving such an errant trend is bad for everyone.

At the end of the day, that's just MySQL marketing trying to explain why MySQL is inferior to PostgreSQL and other commercial offers. After all, bringi

Re:

[dave87656]

Especially since MySQL is already well known for both data loss and corruption in the name of performance. Made all the more embarrassing is that PostgreSQL consistently either meets or beats MySQL in performance and leaves it far behind in scalability.

We moved our DB from MySQL to PG about a year ago and experienced significant performance improvements over both InnoDB and MyISAM. Pretty interesting when you consider that PG is also more secure that MySQL.

My guess is that once PG reaches critical mass as an Open Source DB name, people will be moving away from MySQL in groves.

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[LOLLinux]

So not supporting strict ACID and/or parts of ANSI SQL can allow databases to perform faster.

Yeah and who needs dumb things like data consistency and prevention of data corruption?

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[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

They aren't dumb, just expensive. If they cost more than their worth, you don't need them.

If you're dealing with real money, You *NEED* them. If you're dealing with tweets, you can't afford them.

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[dave87656]

They aren't dumb, just expensive. If they cost more than their worth, you don't need them.

True, but PostgreSQL is faster and more secure. Why not have both if you can?

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[Errol backfiring]

Because of other things? To name one: I find MySQL a great database for agile database development. I can write SQL in a way that upgrades toward a situation instead of failing when the incorrect old situation was there . Lots of those things can be done without stored procedures, in a legible and maintainable manner. In PostgreSQL, I would probably have to write lots and lots of procedures, making this totally unmaintainable.

See Evolving a database with MySQL [howtoforge.org]

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[dave87656]

I moved our application of now over 1 millions lines from MySQL to Postgres with only a few minor changes and no stored procedures.

I'm not sure what you mean by "I can write SQL in a way that upgrades toward a situation instead of failing when the incorrect old situation was there." Can you elaborate?

In my experience, MySQL doesn't offer any more flexibility on the whole than Postgresql. Some stuff is better with MySQL, like replication, whereas other stuff is better with Postgres (performance of joins, var

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[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

You can't. I wasn't saying that MySql was perfect in all cases when you didn't care about ACID. Twitter can't use PostgreSQL. Facebook can't use PostgreSQL. The performance hit of ACID is too much. There isn't a single tool that solves all data storage and retrieval problems. You can argue that PostgreSQL is better for most usage cases than Mysql ( if you're dead set at arguing Mysql vs PostgreSQL while ignoring every other database.). I wouldn't agree with that statement, but it makes a lot more sense than

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[dave87656]

I wasn't trying to imply that PG is better than everything else for all workloads. But, for relational database scenarios, I've found that PG is faster and more secure than MySQL. We've noticed a significant performance improvement even comparing PG to MyISAM tables. Given that,

Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc, I believe use Key-Value stores for performance reasons. Hadoop is a big player in that game, Google, Yahoo and IBM are using it. Not sure about Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and so on.

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[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

That's all I was saying. We agree then.

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[plopez]

Really? Any DB engine can do that. Just do a minimal install, remove all constraints and stop transaction logging. You'll be amazed how fast a DB engine can run.

BTW, *eventual* consistency is an oxymoron. Once it's gone it is gone. Unless you do a total wipe of all the tables and then reload them from the original data sources. Once a DB is corrupted, good luck cleaning it up. As many victims of identity theft have learned.

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[fimbulvetr]

It may be an oxymoron in the RDBMS world. In the distributed world, it's par for the course - in fact, it has its own letter in CAP.

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[DragonWriter]

If you look at the current state of data storage, the new trend is for *less* features and for more speed, concurrency, throughput and *eventual consistency*.

Speed, concurrency, throughput, distributability, scalability, etc. are all features. So its not "less features" but "a different mix of features".

And, actually, the trend of having new DBs that sacrifice ACID features for speed and performance features, which then evolve to have ACID features added in as people build bigger systems with them and real

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[rfelsburg]

Maybe it's just me, but I find 'Psotgres' to be far lacking compared to mysql. Ease of use also counts for something when working with the masses...and yes I am making fun of your inability to spell the very product you're trying to troll with. Fun times.

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[kestasjk]

Yay, your UID isn't half mine :-)

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[daveime]

Thank you, tears in eyes, coffee out of nose, sides aching, the whole works.

Read like a helpful tip from the pages of Viz. You're not Geordie by any chance are you ?

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[negRo_slim]

Hint: when someone has a UID that's half yours and you suspect someone is a cunt, it's probably you. Especially if you're German.

What if they simply bought their UID [slashdot.org]

Who would the cunt be then?

Re:frist psotgres

[nxtw]

Ease of use also counts for something when working with the masses...

By that metric, MS Access wins every time...

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[fooslacker]

counts for something != counts for everything but nice try

Re:frist psotgres

[nxtw]

counts for something != counts for everything but nice try

I can't think of many criteria in which PostgreSQL is lacking compared to MySQL. In my experience, MySQL is "easier to use" only in that the default security configuration on some distribution packages is easier to understand.

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[fooslacker]

Oh I don't have a strong opinion on which is better, I've used both effectively. I was just responding to the guy above who was claiming Access should win because your selection criteria was flawed.

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[cheekyboy]

stop being a tool, it was obvious it was not his only criteria. And in any marketplace it is an important one that will gain more users.

Do I see netbsd high in the usage ranks?

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[fooslacker]

stop being a tool, it was obvious it was not his only criteria. And in any marketplace it is an important one that will gain more users.

Do I see netbsd high in the usage ranks?

Actually I didn't think it was obvious.

As I read it the first guy was just saying he preferred mysql to PostreSQL and that one of the deciding factors in that decision was ease of use.

The second guy as I read it was trying to discount the original argument by showing that ease of use should not be considered because that means Access would win which we consider absurd knowing many of the weaknesses with Access.

I don't think that pointing out that that is absurd reasoning is "being a tool" but I am

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[AbbyNormal]

Out of the box replication in PostgresSQL was a bit lacking, last I checked. MySQL replication seems to work well for smaller scale projects.

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[PerfectionLost]

I would bump this for humor if I could.

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[CarpetShark]

Actually, most desktop people who are just after ease of use end up using Excel :)

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[nxtw]

Actually, most desktop people who are just after ease of use end up using Excel :)

This is true; I actually thought about saying Excel instead of Access. I chose Access because it actually is a relational database.

When used with SharePoint, Access 2007/2010 is easier - SharePoint will automatically create an Access database using SharePoint lists/libraries as tables, and Access will synchronize the content. Setting up a custom SharePoint list (or customizing an existing one) isn't too difficult - certainly

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, transactions. Those are a real bitch, aren't they? I mean, they get in the way all of the time, protecting your data's integrity. We can't fucking have atomicity. No fucking way. PostgreSQL totally lacks the random and unexpected data corruption that makes MySQL great.

And foreign key constraints! Stupid little motherfuckers, preventing arbitrary data entry and orphan records. In my MySQL database, I want to insert any sort of crap I feel like, even if it violates all sorts of constraints.

The worst, th

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[sproingie]

The indexes only work on MyISAM. Who needed transactions anyway? Every feature MySQL lays claim to is always full of gotchas like this.

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[arndawg]

Only if you're using innodb amiryte? MySQL is the first database language most poeple learn using phpmyadmin so they'll just use the default.

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[GooberToo]

What ease of use issues? That hasn't been an issue in years. PostgreSQL is well supported even on Windows these days.

For the vast majority of users, PostgreSQL scales better, has far more features, supports far more PLs, is technically more advanced, has a vastly superior query optimizer, is more stable, is well supported, and doesn't have the politics surrounding it like MySQL does. Even better, it teaches proper ANSI SQL which carries over to any number of other engines, excepting MySQL.

Given there are no

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[FsG]

Because most web publishers are deployers, rather than developers, of web software. The overwhelming majority of this software is written in PHP and assumes the presence of MySQL. Even those packages that support other databases often treat them as second-class citizens; they tend to be much less developed and tested.

I am a sane person, and I care more about using the database that'll work best with the apps I want to use (such as phpBB), than I do about promoting tech for its own sake.

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[TheCowSaysMooNotBoo]

Never had to 'solve' data correction due to the non-acid compliance of the db I suppose? And what features exactly are you using from mysql that isn't in postgresql?

pgsql vs. mysql

[codealot]

Everytime I see this debate on slashdot it invariably degenerates into claims of mysterious missing features (what are they?) or non-transactional characteristics of MyISAM. Too bad, because I'm genuinely interested in a good comparison. I use MySQL extensively today but have worked on both in the past.

Anyone still tempted to go with the "non-acid" argument... give it up, else risk looking ignorant or foolish. MySQL is designed to support many storage engines. Anyone using MySQL this past decade who car

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[GooberToo]

Maybe it's just me, but I find 'Psotgres' to be far lacking compared to mysql.

Factually, its just you. The fact is, MySQL is horribly lacking compared to PostgreSQL. MySQL is constantly chasing PostgreSQL's feature set. That's the facts. No trolling required.

Why do you think so many PostgreSQL supports are so rabid about how inferior MySQL is in just about every metric that matters for a RDBMS? Its like constantly watching Pinto [wikipedia.org] owners rave about how great their car is when for the same money they could have gotten just about anything else and been better off, not to mention safer.

and firebird!

[Unordained]

Just to wedge this in: Firebird users often feel the same way. Firebird 2.5 is now available as an official release candidate.

Yes, the database engine. Not the browser. *sigh*

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[GooberToo]

Agreed. While I've never used Firebird, I've never once heard a bad thing about.

I share your pain.

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[aztracker1]

I like firebird a lot. What I really like is that it's easy to use the embedded version for applications, then transition to a stand alone RDBMS install with nothing more than a config change. It doesn't scale/replicate so well, but for small to mid sized projects it's far better than mysql, and for mid-large projects postgres is way better. Other than logging or chat (higher concurrency, low/no relational mapping), I can't see mysql being the best choice for anything.

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[Unordained]

I'm curious: what kind of scaling / replication problem did you have?

Scaling: lots of connections, lots of tables, lots of requests, lots of data, ... ?

Replication: for sharding, for master / slave, for multi-site, for backups (incremental? hot?), ... ?

I ask because I haven't personally profiled FB vs. PG on any of those metrics, and they get enough less market share than other products to make finding such comparisons difficult.

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[codealot]

Okay I'll bite. I'm not familiar with postgresql versions since about 7.x.

From http://www.postgresql.org/about/:

• An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Un

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[GooberToo]

What are the compelling differences?

Security. Scalability. And recently, raw performance with more much more room through to exist. Superior query plan general for non-trivial queries; which also goes to the first three items listed. Extensibility such that MySQL can't even be compared. Geospacial capabilities with indicies + ACID. PLs for stored procedures and a multitude of choices and capabilities. Real life deployments where ACID accounts; compared to MySQL where people generally use it as a large, non-ACID storage retrieval system where

Editor Fail

[OverlordQ]

Downloads are not here. Might try actually putting a full URL in there instead of MySQLServer5.5.0-m2

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[LOLLinux]

It's kdawson. 5 time winner of the "Worst Slashdot Editor of All Time" award.

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[daveime]

5 times today ... or possibly 6. depends how many articles he posts.

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[Minwee]

Thank you for your helpful comments, Dr. Sokal. We'll be in touch when the committee has made a decision on whether or not to publish your paper.

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[LOLLinux]

Because otherwise they'd have to admit that all their years diddling around with a toy database was all for naught?

semi-synchronous replication

[Honken]

"near-asynchronous replication" is wrong, should be "semi-synchronous replication" as stated in the article. Striving for almost having replication asynchronous sounds like a poor implementation of synchronous replication :)

The Summary should have mentioned this

[Monkeedude1212]

FTA:

MySQL 5.5 will also support the ANSI/ISO SQL standard method of programmatically returning errors inside SQL procedures, called Signal/Resignal, which some users have called for.

This was never really an issue, because MySQL always had it's way of preforming whatever you needed it to do, but I used it in Oracle and it really does make a difference. Here's a link that will show you a bit of what it does, for those who don't know.

All in all, I'm glad things are moving forward. Still not the forerunner but still in the game.

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[Monkeedude1212]

Oops. I forgot to provide that link [oracle-base.com] I had.

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[Anonymous Coward]

that links has nothing to do with signal/resignal.

Have they fixed NDBCLUSTER yet?

[ducomputergeek]

The last two times I tested it for a true shared-nothing HA cluster, NDBCLUSTER failed miserably without a lot of tweaking. The optimizer was buggy to the point of being broken. And basically the response I got from MySQL AB at the time was, "If you want to use NDBCLUSTER, you'd better get the Enterprise Support Package". After pricing out what it would cost in support from MySQL AB AND the cost of having to go through and rewrite a bunch of our code to optimize it, it was cheaper to buy DB2.

Company I work for now uses PostgreSQL for main product lines. But two of their package are third party and use MySQL including their billing system. It works, but as it stands right now, neither of those systems are being taxed on a Dual-Quad Core DB server with 12GB RAM. In fact, it barely runs at 5% of resource utilization. We still use MySQL for one of our website's CMS. And it does the job well.

MySQL works well up until you need more than one box. Replication can work in some circumstances, but as a HA solution, it looses any advantages it had in terms of cost vs. extremely proven and reliable systems.

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[TheLinuxSRC]

What are you using to cluster Postgres? I have looked at a couple of options here [postgresql.org] but didn't see an open source solution that was current and able to handle multi-master synchronous replication with some sort of automatic failover.

Thanks for your response!

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[h4rr4r]

You generally would do the failover using another product like heartbeat, to promote a slave or whatever else needs to be done during failover. The unix way is each app does one thing and is good at it.

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[msimm]

I agree about the HA and if you've got a highly transactional application and need enterprise grade fail-over Oracle RAC or some variation of PostgreSQL might work great for you. But for many people MySQL is still a good option and has some nice/useful features (online fs-based backups sans datapump, previously mentioned replication). There's also an amazing amount of information available about MySQL tailored to just about any skill-level, including a number of alternative approaches to HA.

My current pr

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[codealot]

The NDB releases basically forked from mainline MySQL. Latest is NDB 7.x, which is actually very good at what it does. Not *quite* ready for what we need but getting very close. ALTER ONLINE is a nifty feature... I've used it to add/drop indexes on the fly from tables in continuous use.

Earlier releases of NDB required that all indexes and data fit in main memory, but that has been remedied with disk data tables. Currently, disk data tables can only store fixed-length data (all strings are padded to thei

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[Zontar The Mindless]

Nice to see some honest feedback from someone who's obviously tried the product. Glad you like ALTER ONLINE -- I'll pass that along to the devs.

MySQL 5.1.41 mainline has just been merged into what will be the next set of MySQL Cluster releases, BTW.

True variable-width columns on disk, indexes on disk, and better join performance are high on our list of priorities. As well as a few other goodies that'll be coming out early next year, but I can't talk about those just yet. :)

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[Macka]

How about using DRBD for Mysql High Availability clustering [mysql.com] instead of NDBCLUSTER? In a nutshell, one DB instance is used to handle writes and this is synchronously replicated to a Heartbeat cluster standby node using DRBD. Asynchronous replication to more DBs handle all the reads (with load balancing between them). Use Sharding to scale out when you need more capacity.

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[Macka]

Here's another link [mysql.com] with a better explanation and a nice pretty picture :)

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[GeekLove]

SELECT * FROM features WHERE build = 'current'

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[GooberToo]

select * from features where build = 'current' and product = 'postgresql'

They are continuously chasing PostgreSQL.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Choose: Referential Integrity or Partitioning

[w_mute]

Still no support for foreign keys in partitioned tables. Makes partitioning pretty much worthless in most real world deployments.

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[fimbulvetr]

They're also still missing 99% of the subquery optimizations they had in the 6.0 Alpha codebase and 99% of the other improvements. When they went sun they started worrying too much about BC and improvements slowed down substantially. In my opinion, if you want less buggy software on a faster release model, you need to not give priority to BC. But then you lose the support contracts, which is all sun cares about.

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[dave87656]

Will they label it with number 6 when it finally come out of beta closet?

Version 6 is the release that will have the Falcon Engine which is supposed to come closer to PostgreSQL performance.

Near-asynchronous?

[saleenS281]

Is that supposed to be near-synchronous? What the hell is "near-asynchrynous"? I don't even see how "near-asynchronous" would be possible. If you aren't synchronous, you're asynchronous, and it's just a matter of how far away from synchronous you are. That's like saying "he's traveling at near-not-the-speed-of-light".

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[dave87656]

My thoughts exactly. "Near-asynchronous" sounds like it's still synchronous.

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[PiSkyHi]

Near-asynchronous means they're still waiting for their first query to return a result..

You keep using that word...

[Will.Woodhull]

...but I don't think it means what you think it means...

Bequeath [answers.com]

Near-asynchronous replication is a disappointment

[mysidia]

MySQL already has perfect asynchronous master-slave replication through binary logging.

What's hard is synchronous replication it would be a very useful enhancement if 5.5 had a reliable synchronous replication option, and supported clustering, failover/hot-standby, and failed-node recovery/resynch.

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[Sxooter]

It has working async (log shipping isn't synchronous) but it has lots of bugs that can jump up and bite you in the ass that haven't been fixed yet. Search the MySQL bug database for examples. It still requires you to stop your whole cluster and replicate the master to the slave to work. For large datasets this is unworkable if you need continuous uptime.

It's pretty good, and super easy to setup, but it's not perfect.

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[mysidia]

It works fine, and I use it.. And no, you don't need to stop the master on a regular basis for any reason.

Clients that perform updates have to connect to master.

For select queries, use a load balancer that connects to the slaves.

When you are creating a new slave, you replicate it first, then add it to the load balanced cluster AFTER replication is proceeding.

The asynchronous nature has some drawbacks though, since your app can never really be 100% sure that what you see is the latest version of th

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[LizardKing]

... it has lots of bugs that can jump up and bite you in the ass

Well, that's what you get for using a donkey [dictionary.co.uk] instead of database.