Posted on 8 Comments

The search for MySQL 5.5

So, MySQL 6.0 was ditched, and a few weeks ago 5.4 was also – its features to be added in other (earlier) versions (I’m told 5.2 but not sure). I reckon that’s good news, regardless of the version number. There was also an announcement about a change in the release mechanism at Sun/MySQL.

Now for practicals. If I look on Launchpad, the 5.1 branch is the only active one (next to 5.0 fixes, of course). 5.4 was last updated 15 weeks ago. There is no 5.2 on there that I can find. Wasn’t looking for it really, just happened to notice its absence while I was trying to find 5.5. And the reason for that was that Miguel closed a bug I was following, noting it was no longer reproducible in 5.5. He pastes some code that reports mysql as 5.5, so it’s not a typo.

So, in addition to the above list of abandonment (5.4, 6.0), we have 5.2 which I’m told should exist but doesn’t at Launchpad, and 5.5 which appears to exist and is news to me yet doesn’t appear to be out there either. Are you confused? I am.

The particular bug was found during a training session and occurs on Windows. Now the bug is closed, but we can’t see code and have no indication when it or binaries will be available. So what do I tell a user asking about the bug and its apparent fix? (I have to say apparent because Miguel’s response indicate that it’s merely not reproducible on the later version, there’s no specific fix)

Updates

  • Vladislav Vainroub notes there’s a mysql-next-mr branch on launchpad which is in fact version 5.5 inside. It appears to be mirrored, last sync 5 minutes ago but last changeset 39 hours ago. So this seems like a publishing branch, not a development branch (otherwise we’d see more activity).
  • Paul DuBois tells that the mysql-server trunk on launchpad is now 5.5. Last activity is from a week ago, so I presume that like the abovementioned mysql-next-mr branch it’s synced and not actually from a live development branch. Pity.
Posted on 8 Comments
Posted on 1 Comment

MySQL Replication Heartbeat

Well isn’t that interesting, hidden all the way at the end of the MySQL 5.4 information are two words that really peaked my interest: Replication Heartbeat. And it wasn’t even using caps or other highlighting in the original text. Reading through the feature list of 5.4, I’m very impressed. All necessary/useful stuff for the real world, no marketing or enterprise blah.

Of course we’ll have to explore it in detail to have more opinion. Proof is in production, not paper. As this is the first most of us have heard/seen of it, it’ll take time to explore. Someone who tried to install the tarball this morning got an assertion during the system table installation. That’s not the best first impression, but that might be a build issue. I’m really pretty excited about the lineup of actual useful features.

Update… ok so at the end of the announcement it refers to a Preview Release (Edwin, can you please murder this ghastly oxymoronic abomination in OSS Marketing?) and then a note that apart from some InnoDB performance patches the described enhancements are not actually in the version that was just made available. There will be future announcements/releases. Was I just giving compliments for actual delivery, and it turns out it’s vaporware after all. Aaargh!!!

So, we’ll be perusing https://launchpad.net/mysql-server/5.4 instead. The old “show us the code” works best. Let’s hope the code is actually there.

Posted on 1 Comment