The Importance of MySQL 5.1 GA Release
MySQL 5.1 beta release cycle started in March of 2006 with the 5.1.7 Release. Last week, 15 beta and 9 RC releases later, MySQL 5.1 GA came out.
Many blogs have been written and published about new MySQL features included in this release. Some other blogs discussed its engineering quality. Indeed, just go to the MySQL / Developer Zone / Bugs Home and search how many bugs have been fixed between 5.1.7 and 5.1.30, and the dramatic improvement in software quality will become evident. Surely, for a database platform with over ten million installations, the number of bugs is surprisingly low.
Still, why is this MySQL version 5.1-GA and not 5.1.30-RC?
In my career, I worked at Fidelity Investments Enterprise Architecture organization twice.
My first tenure there was 12 years ago after leaving Sybase Advanced Indexing Products Division (a.k.a., Sybase IQ). Among many things we had to do was evaluating vendor software and hardware products, selecting some of them, and creating “centers of competence” around the selected “strategic platform” products. In this context, database systems products were viewed as “software platforms”. Using open source database platforms was unthinkable.
When I returned to Fidelity five years later, the “center of competence” based approach evolved further. At centers of competence, software platforms were evaluated, acceptance-tested, and adopted; “best practices” of implementation and use were documented; and internal consulting was provided to application teams. Open source “centers of competence” evolved, albeit their focus was on libraries, tools, and Web services. Still, for a number of reasons, no open source databases under consideration, especially their beta versions and release candidates.
As I was looking at the MySQL 5.1 GA last week, I imagined myself in my old Fidelity Investments Enterprise Architect shoes. What would be the missing pieces separating MySQL from enthusiastic adoption at a company like Fidelity Investments?
Scalability and the ability to support growth of data volumes and infrastructure were lacking. MySQL 5.1 GA has addressed this by providing partitioning. For analytical, BI, and data warehousing applications on scale, enterprise customers can now use Infobright.
Operational readiness features were missing or lacking. Not any more, as MySQL 5.1 GA offers all the necessary pieces for high availability, replication, failover, disaster recovery, etc. For example, MySQL provides row-based and hybrid replication, event scheduler (for scheduling various batch jobs and database tasks at a datacenter), dynamic logging with the ability to attribute resource usage to particular tasks and queries, performance and load testing utility, user session administration, etc.
So, why is 5.1.30 called GA? Because it is ready for the enterprise, ready for wide adoption by the Fidelity Investments of the world.
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