MySQL 5.1 released with crashing bugs

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, "The reason 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.

Worse still, Widenius wrote, "If you plan to use any of the new features of MySQL 5.1, regard these as if they would be of beta quality. Test any usage of these features extensively for in close-to-live scenarios before putting them onto a production server." These new features, which Widenius tells us not to trust, include such long awaited "row-based replication." Indeed, row-based replication has "At least 28 open bugs of which 26 are verified and at least 11 are targeted to be fixed in later MySQL 5.1 releases."

How bad are those bugs? Widenius points out that MySQL 5.1 will suffer a "Replication failure on RBR + UPDATE the primary key. This bug is such a serious issue that it should have stopped a GA release!" Widenius, not I, is the one who emphasizes just how really bad this particular problem is.

The only people Widenius can recommend moving up to 5.1, if you can call it a recommendation, are people who haven't used MySQL before since "At least it's better than the MySQL 5.0 community version, which has not been updated for some time."

A few months ago I reported that there was a rumor that Widenius was ready to quit Sun, MySQL's new owners. Sun, is probably wishing that he had left after this ringing condemnation of how Sun has been mis-developing MySQL

The writing has been on the wall for some time that MySQL's crew were not getting along well in Sun. MySQL's other co-founder, David Axmark, had resigned in October. Axmark left saying, "I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to 'retire' from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis."

Well, clearly from what Widenius has to say about this latest MySQL release, Axmark wasn't the only MySQL leader who hates working for Sun.

This is a pity. I don't know why the marriage of Sun and MySQL is failing, but it's gone terribly wrong. When the deal was announced, I thought Sun buying MySQL was a great move. I was wrong.

Worse still, from Sun's point of view, this extremely public rejection of MySQL, the company and its development policies by a top Sun executive couldn't have come at a worse time. Sun was already in deep trouble. I had hoped that by sticking with its open-source course, Sun would come out of its nose-dive.

Now? Stick a fork in them. Sun and MySQL are done.