Sun Microsystems late last week released version 5.1 of the open source MySQL database software, but the software's founder simultaneously warned of a number of bugs present in the included new features that still needed to be fixed.
Michael "Monty" Widenius, the founder of MySQL stated in a blog post that most of the issues identified were serious or crashing bugs. Not all problems are related to the new features; there are a number of older, known bugs that are still present in this release.
The new features introduced have been ranked as "beta" quality.
There are a number of issues associated with the partitioning feature, such as the difficulty to restore a partitioned table if it crashes, and the chance of losing all data in the event of a server crashing during the rename table feature of a partitioned table. Widenius highlighted that the feature was inefficient, particularly if there were many partitions in a database.
Row-based replication has not been enabled by default, because of a number of problems. Users are advised to test the latest MySQL version before deploying it to production systems.
Just imagine a car manufacturer saying "Here's our new family car. It has the latest technology to go fast, save fuel and protect passengers. The problem is that we can't work out why the petrol isn't getting from the tank to the engine or why the tyres keep going down. Price: $33,000 + dealer charges"
I think this chain of events is a joke. Why would someone adopt software in a commercial environment that is known to have more bugs than an ASIO agent's spy kit.