Sun has just made MySQL 5.1 GA with a number of new features and performance enhancements. The first available release was 5.1.3 in November of 2005! Then MySQL 5.1 had the first Release Candidate 5.1.22 in September of 2007
What’s different
There is a loooooong list of changes for this release. Sun/MySQL have been working on this version for years so that’s to be expected. Despite that, upgrading from a prior 5.0.x release is painless and they have even added a upgrade helper.
Here are some of the new features:
- Partitioning: Increased Performance, the optimizer knows about the partitions and what data is stored in the partition so mysql will access only those necessary partitions during query execution. Simplified Data Management, if designing the data structure correctly you can get an easier/cleaner database that will be easier to manage.
- Event Scheduler: This tool has been missing in MySQL. Moving common recurring SQL-based tasks to execute on the database server and not in cron/windows scheduler is a very welcome feature.
- Row-Based and Hybrid Replication: There are so many wins that you get from using row-based replication and I feel this is a great feature that was added to 5.1. The new default to 5.1.30 is the hybrid mode which downgrades to statement based replication. The MySQL manual has a good pros and cons for the two http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/replication-sbr-rbr.html.
- MySQL Cluster: This is now a separate product which has to be added if you want to use the NDB cluster engine. Pay attention here as this move confused people since the Cluster version is now at 6.3.
- Tablespace Backup: You can now use mysqldump –all-tablespaces to dump a NDCLUSTER tablespace.
- mysql_upgrade: Checks all tables in all databases for incompatibilities with the current version of MySQL Server. If a table is found to have a possible incompatibility, it is checked. If any problems are found, the table is repaired. With multiple mysql servers running on one db server use mysql_upgrade -p 3307.
Talk of the town
There has been much talk about the new release and “if” this release is production ready. It is our belief that this release is production ready. For our applications, we have been running 5.1 for 6 months in production without hitting one single bug. That said, we caution you to make this decision on your own, with proper testing. We recommend that you read the MySQL bugs list, and install a test server where you can run tests with your environment.
Dig Deeper
Here is the extensive list of changes for MySQL 5.1.x.
