Wow. Talk about your disgruntled employees. Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, MySQL’s founder and, for the moment, still Sun’s CTO for its MySQL division, greeted the GA (general availability) of the latest version of the popular open-source database system MySQL 5.1 by writing, “I am asking you to be very cautious about MySQL 5.1 is that there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.”
This is the GA release!? This sure doesn’t sound like a ready to go to work software release to me! In fact, according to Widenius, the long-delayed release of MySQL 5.1, is anything but ready for production use.
Widenius went on to write in his blog, Monty Says, “If you are using MySQL 5.1 just as a ‘better’ version of MySQL 5.0 and you don’t plan to use any of the new features in MySQL 5.1 then you are probably fine to try out MySQL 5.1. You should however not put it into production without testing it fully, preferably by running it on a couple of slaves for some weeks. It may even be the best to wait for a couple of minor/patch releases before putting the MySQL 5.1 server into production.”
But, Widenius goes on, “Don’t expect that all critical bugs that you may have encountered in 5.0 to be fixed in 5.1. 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 not exactly reassuring.