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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.
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 not sure what you are trying to say. If we have to play car analogy - lets say both cars engines will fail if you go over 80 kmh on a sunday while wearing blue. One vendor will tell you before you buy the car - the other waits until you've been on the phone with roadside assistance for a couple days. The severity of the issue is the same - it's just how the manufacturer handles it that is different.
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 worked on a project with an Oracle consultant who had been on his own before he joined Oracle. I asked why he made the switch and he told me it was for one main reason - so that he would get full access to all the documentation, including all the bugs and open issues.
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?
Obviously 5.1 is not a perfect release. Quality is critically important to a database and I hope MySQL/Sun takes note of Montyâ(TM)s concerns, ...
However in my opinion MySQL 5.1 a very good release, long ready for general production usage.
You call THAT a rebuttal? My goodness... it no wonder MySQL sucks if he can admit on the one hand it's bugridden (not in those words, sure) and then say at the same time, it's ready for general production usage. What the hell does that mean?! It just makes me ANGRY to think people like this are DBAs! Does he mean to suggest your "general production usage" server is OK with lost rows and table corruption... if the chances of it happening are rare enough? Does he mean to suggest "general production usage" is a separate category from "people who use the advertised features of the product?" Seriously.... arrrrgh..... I think I'm having a stroke, I need to go take a valium or something.
Well, you'd be a fool to buy MS SQL for its enterprise capabilities.
It has its strengths, of course, but it's most important strength is it is the default database slice of the Microsoft deployment stack and is well integrated with Microsoft development tools. For modest projects it provides the kinds of advantages MySQL does in the LAMP stack.
I'm not saying it is a bad product, depending on your needs. Nor am I saying that you can't do "enterprise applications" (whatever those are) if you design around its limitations. I'm just saying that if I weren't developing around a completely Microsoft based solution, I wouldn't give MS SQL a second glance. There are cheaper (open source) solutions on the low end, and more scalable solutions on the high end.
If maximum upward scalability from a PC host starting point was required, I'd go with Oracle. The fit on the low end is a bit awkward, but it's workable. You've got to be careful when you license Oracle because you can spend too much money very easily, but if you know what you're doing Oracle is scalable and cost-efficient. If you don't know what you're doing, that's a different affair altogether.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
With all due respect to Ryan, I agree with Monty here. Not just 5.1, but the whole MySQL 5.x tree has been shipping with release critical bugs. What's more, some of those bugs (like the one that has been open since 2003) have lowered priority now because "people know about them."
It sounds like MySQL could benefit from a more debian-like release criteria.
df -h
You call software that can bring down multiple slaves with a drop table statement in a transaction production-ready? Have fun with that.
df -h
>How does something like THAT pass QA?
That's REALLY unfair to blame Oracle for QA processes... they outsource SQA process, so it's a SUPPLIER problem.
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.
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.
If you allow your users direct access to SQL and rely on SQL permissions you probably shouldn't. Most MySQL setups have no way of allowing untrusted users to run SQL directly so they can't run a drop table statement. So yes, if your letting complete strangers run SQL on your database you might want to look somewhere else.
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.