Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sun's Mickos Is OK With Monty's MySQL 5.1 Rant

Posted by kdawson on from the say-what-you-want dept.

narramissic writes "Back on November 29, MySQL developer Michael Widenius trashed Sun's decision to give MySQL 5.1 a 'generally available' designation in a now-infamous blog post. Widenius warned users to be 'very cautious about MySQL 5.1' because 'there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.' And now we get Sun's response. In an interview Monday, Marten Mickos, senior VP of Sun's database group, said, 'I learned over many years about the benefits and the painfulness of absolute transparency in open source. A little bit of debate never hurts. This is part of being an open-source company. ... People are free to blog about what they want.' Doubtless, this will do nothing to end the debate over whether Widenius will follow fellow MySQL co-founder David Axmark's lead and leave Sun."

3 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Uhm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We use MySQL in a number of critical aspects of our company. I'd rather have a company be honest and let me know I might have some issues with this new release than pretend there are no issues. That lets me stay with my current version and upgrade later.

    Rather be on the stable blunt edge in critical infrastructure, not the bleeding edge.

  2. MySQL join performance deficiency, 2 orders of mag by nluv4hs · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My subject line sounds inflammatory yet see below for hard numbers and a simple, real example. Someone please show me how to coax MySQL to perform as well as PostgreSQL for this simple query (Postgres 496 times faster). It's been over two months since I posted this problem on two very public forums, with no response from the MySQL community. Would someone please stand up for MySQL and save it from looking weak here?!
  3. Re:To their credit by Sentry21 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sounds like you were using MyISAM. InnoDB will find and detect corrupt pages - and considering that pages get written into the doublewrite buffer, then written to the log, then written to the tablespace, it's fairly unlikely that things end up corrupt without some kind of disk-related issue.

    It doesn't auto-repair table because there can be several issues that could cause that to be a bad idea - for example, a broken RAID controller or faulty disk. If your disk is losing writes sporadically (which I've seen happen), then you'll move from a few corrupt records to a swath of corrupt records.

    Re: the date thing, the philosophy was that it's not the database's job to validate data. You could use -00-00 to refer to an all-year event in some kind of astronomical calendaring system, for example, or 0000-mm-dd to refer to something that happened 2008 years ago. If you really want to limit it to a specific range of dates, then you can tell MySQL that, and you can enforce it in your application (or in a trigger, for that matter).

    Your rant would have been very apropos ten years ago; nowadays it sounds like you're just holding a grudge because you don't know how it works or what it does.