Slashdot Mirror
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.
Ryan Thiessen, a long-time 5.1 user, strongly rebuts Monty on his blog.
you had me at #!
maybe they are just trying hard to be more like the commercial enterprise databases. my experience with oracle was that they have a lot more bugs than this - it's just you can't actually find out about them until you call support. Then you find out they have known about it for some time, they just don't publish it. They hide all this stuff instead and only let certain things out.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Impressive, now MySQL can have features other databases (PostgreSQL among others) have had for *years*. I've never understood; people like MySQL because it is "light", "simple", "easy", blah, blah.... and yet they add all these enterprise features that then everyone will laud about how MySQL is "growing up" or some such. MySQL is one of the best examples of self redefined success I think I've ever seen.
If you want these features why not use a database that has had them for a long time, where they are better tested, and possibly get better performance under concurrent load as a side benefit.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Just about every major non-open source project that has shipped with major bugs, the /. crowd jumps on for releasing poor quality products due to bad planning, poor communication, legal reasons, marketing deadlines, oh and the list goes on. When an open source project is shipped with major bugs though, what do I hear? Excuses. Is it just possible that people who develop open source are human, and make the same decisions, for the same reasons, as their closed-source counterparts? Which might lead to the conclusion that different methods don't necessarily yield different results; ie, that open source innately presents no inherent technical advantage over closed source, only social and legal advantages. Uh oh... they're getting a duck and a large scale out. I think that's my cue to post and run now...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm I the only one that get the creeps when a 1 is followed after the . in the version?
Everyone here knows what he's talking about when he says "beta". It'll be a few years at least before people who know the term "beta" will get confused by TFA's use of it, and it'll be much longer than that before anyone on this forum will get confused. It's entirely possible, even likely, that the trend will reverse itself in that time. I haven't seen any other site abuse the term as badly as Google, and most places use it properly.
I've been using 5.0 in production for well over a year and found no 'critical' bugs. (For most of that time I had access to MySQL's paid support.)
As Ryan said there is no such thing as bug free software but there is such a thing as production-ready software. MYSQL 5.0 HAZ IT.
you had me at #!
If it returns 1, the column has data. If it returns 0, it's null.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Depends on what you call "par", but for my values of "par", MySQL has never been there.
Do you have ESP?
It just has them on a different scale and there's a different release. If you look through the past release notes for pgsql, you'll see that occasionally one release would come out with some horrific server crashing bug, get reported and get fixed.
Now, the timeframe is what is the key. For MySQL there are server crashing bugs that have been in place since 2003 or before.
For PostgreSQL, once such a bug is documented and reproduce-able, it is generally squashed in hours, days, and occasionally, for really complex problems, in a week or so.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
I've used MySQL for years...
The same thing in MySQL would have taken me thirty seconds now, and no more than 15 minutes when I was starting out. With Postgres, it took me upwards of 20 minutes when it should have taken much less time.
That's because you know MySQL, so of course something that works differently is going to be more work for you to figure out.
I've used PostgreSQL for years, when I had to set up a MySQL database for some php app it took much more than 15 minutes to figure it out and get it running. The primary problem was MySQL's obtuse user management system.
With PostgreSQL I know that it's secure by default -- the default user has no password, so even if you enable password authentication it won't work (because it has no password!). You log in locally with trusted authentication, and issue the very logical CREATE USER. Edit the self-documented config file to allow remote hosts to access the database using your preferred authenticaion method, and you're done.
With MySQL, new users are automagically created by the GRANT command?! Huh? On top of that, passwords are apparently specific to a certain host string. Bizarre. Do I need to use localhost for the actual machine name for local users? What about remote machine without a reverse DNS entry? What's the order of precedence for '%' vs a more specific name?
Oh, the default 'root' account has no password ...and allows access over the network. Wonderful. Okay, so to change that do I use root@% or root@computer? How do I know I changed the right one and there isn't still some root@something entry? SHOW TABLES is easy enough, how about SHOW USERS? Nope, that's not it.
Time to check the startup guides. Well, one just has a single password change, another has 3 or 4 lines of 'delete from user...'. The reference for GRANT just has a bunch of caveats and warnings, and the "User Account Management" section goes on and on and somehow doesn't manage to tell me what I want to know.
To this day I'm not 100% sure if the MySQL install is secure. I decided my time would be better spent eliminating the MySQL-isms from the app in question so that it can run on Postgres like everything else on the server. There are some very strange queries in there - a lot of GROUP BY expressions that make no sense and aren't valid SQL. Some of it I'm not sure how it ever worked.
-Does it silently accept CONSTRAINTS other than FOREIGN KEYs and then not use them? ...
Why is ignoring FOREIGN KEYs okay? A constraint is a constraint, IMO.
Last I checked FKs worked, if you're using InnoDB, and then only kinda (no deferred checking, which is the SQL standard default).
There is too much adoration of personal database favorites and excessive condemnation of competing products
While I'm currently a CIO for a small-to-mid-sized company, I've been using relational databases now for more than twenty years.
For years, I've been HEARING about crash issues using MySQL for transactions. For as many years, I've been designing databases and supervising application design that use MySQL for small transaction systems without corruption problems at all. During this time, I've also designed many large read-only tables used by query systems with millions of records without corruption problems.
For more than a decade, I experienced crash after crash when using SQL/Server for databases above a few million records and/or above a couple of hundred gig. Over time, the product got better. Today, my group uses SQL/Server for production applications with almost a hundred million records updated daily with no corruption reported in YEARS.
I've been using Oracle since the 1980's on many platforms. Yes, the early days (pre version 7) were grief and suffering when building OLAP applications. However, each version since Version 7 (1995? 1996?) has been better than every alternative that my employers would consider (including IBM's DB2,) and I am still very comfortable betting my job on Oracle when data warehousing is involved.
When faced with new challenges, I'm free to select any database application so long as I know my job is on the line when something fails. As a result, mission critical applications will still be coded in Oracle and non-critical applications that we can take our time stress testing are mostly done in MySQL.
I still have to use SQL/Server as commercial tools our accountants use (MS Dynamics and Clarity) will work on nothing else.
Instead of cursing every product with which a writer has had bad experiences, the key to reducing grief is to remain aware of the likely risks and rewards of each approach. Yes, Oracle is expensive, but the risks to one's company and personal employment often make it the right choice. Yes, using tools that cost the most will sometimes put a business at a pricing disadvantage and that is when looking at MySQL is sometimes a key to success.
What I could really use is a grid that compares current versions of each product and recommends the likely characteristics of appropriate applications. (For all I know, my own preferences and rules may already be out of date.)
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Instead of cursing every product with which a writer has had bad experiences, the key to reducing grief is to remain aware of the likely risks and rewards of each approach.
We can be as relativistic as we want, as though every system is a snowflake with it's own beauty, but in the real world, sometimes value judgments are useful.
For instance, if you design a truck and I design a car, we can both respect each others' designs, and differ on opinion. You might prefer towing capacity, and market that benefit to construction workers and farmers. I might market the fuel economy and handling to commuters.
If someone designs a car that sometimes explodes when it rains and the steering wheel in the trunk, it's a bad design, period.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
"Even if we have fixed a big majority of the bugs from 5.0 some really critical ones still haven't been addressed."
That's the sort of attitude more than a few people still expect from this "open source stuff".
The pivotal thing about MySQL is that they released a Windows version early and it got on CDs bundled with a ton of programming books. In my opinion, that's why we are talking LAMP instead of LAPP.