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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.
I completely agree, it is some kind of psychological self-preservation mechanism. People have a very hard time accepting that something else than what they have already chosen MIGHT be better in some regards, instead they argue to convince (themselves?) that their choice is superior.
I find it kind of funny that MySQL-advocates once bashed on Postgres for having unneccesary "heavy" features. Now they are praising MySQL for implementing these same features. This convinces me that the self-preservation theory has validity.
Once upon a time MySQL was perhaps the easiest free RDBM to set up since you could download binaries for an impressive number of platform, a lot of projects are written exclusively (and often very poorly) for MySQL which now has a great userbase "locked in", many which does not want/care/are able to check out alternatives when appropriate. Sadly.
MySQL is nice sometimes, but I recently cursed over and over again when a FOSS webshop solution running on MySQL croaked due to too many items in the webshop. The trouble was MySQLs lack of intelligence in the query planner when it comes to subselects. Using a fraction of the items due for inclusion in the final webshop I could optimize MySQL to get the standard search down to a few seconds from well over a minute. But rewriting the SQL-statements not to use subselects cut it down to a few hundreths of a second. These subselects were nothing fancy, things other RDBMs I have used execute swiftly.