MySQL 5.1 Released, Not Quite Up To Par

Mad Merlin writes "It's no secret that MySQL 5.1 has been a long time in the making, with the first beta release being in Nov 2005, but MySQL 5.1.30 has finally been released as GA. MySQL users can expect new features such as table/index partitioning, row based replication, a new plugin architecture, an event scheduler and a host of performance improvements from 5.1." Monty also had a blog post outlining some of the challenges faced in 5.1, including crashing bugs and a beta quality to most new features.

Comments

Re:Wow

[TheRaven64]

MySQL is very easy to use and configure the first time. Postgres isn't nearly as simple

I've heard this a few times. I've installed PostgreSQL on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Every time, the process has been:

1. Install from the package
2. Run initdb to initialise a new storage location (sometimes done by the package - I think it was under RedHat).
3. Run createuser and createdb for each DB user and each DB that needed to exist.

How does MySQL simplify this?

Re:Wow

[larry bagina]

One thing I like about postgresql vs MS Sql is the triggers. MS SQL triggers are after-insert, per statement only, IIRC. Pg triggers are per statement or per row, before or after. There's also a rule system and the ability to rewrite the query, for updateable views or other tricks. The lacking features are clustered indexes, replication, and partitioning. I'll also mention hash indexes -- it has them, but they're not journaled, and they're not generally recommended. I'm not going to comment on MySQL since I haven't used it since 4.x and it sort of has triggers now.

Oh, also, the pgpsql stored procedure language is similar to oracle's psql and fairly fun to program in.

Re:Wow

[jmusits]

.... Things like "SHOW TABLES" are either considerably more difficult in Postgres or harder to find out. ....

More difficult? Harder to find out? Consult help by typing \? and you will see this:
[snip]
Informational
    \d [NAME] describe table, index, sequence, or view
    \d{t|i|s|v|S} [PATTERN] (add "+" for more detail)
                                  list tables/indexes/sequences/views/system tables
[snip]

Then type \dt to show the tables. To me that does not present it seld as more difficult or hard to find out.

Re:well

[nabsltd]

To step away from the metaphor for a second - I have had severity 1 service tickets open with Oracle support for over a day that ended up being unpublished bugs that were fixed with a patch that was not available until you knew you had run into the bug. Sev 1 to be clear is production systems down.

I'll second this. We just ran into such a bug when trying to restore a database.

The application connecting to the database was upgraded, and something went wrong when it tried to modify the schema, so we rolled back to the backup taken immediately before the start of this. Normally, this would have been simple, but apparently there's a bug with our version of Oracle that caused the restore to fail. Luckily, it only took an extra couple of hours to work around and we were still in our planned outage window, but it still sucked that it was a bug known to Oracle.

Of course, we didn't hit the Oracle bug in our development and test systems, because the application didn't fail in the schema update on those, thank's to Mr. Murphy.