Published January 18th, 2004 by Jim O'Halloran
MySQL Roadmap
The next session on my Linux.Conf.Au program was the “MySQL Roadmap” session given by Arjen Lentz, Technical Writer and Trainer for MySQL AB. MySQL AB was founded in 1995 as a “virtual company” with offices and employees around the world. Arjen believes that open source provides some strong advantages for MySQL, especially in the areas of testing and QA. Jeremy’s work trailing daily builds of MySQL with Yahoo! Finance got a mentioned as a good example of this testing.
MySQL and MaxDB will never be completely merged into a single code base, although much work will be done on interoperability between the two. The eventual goal is to be able to run SAP R/3 on top of MySQL, which means that a lot of things like triggers and stored procedures, which aren’t supported currently, will need to be added to MySQL. MySQL AB is working on this at the moment.
MySQL runs an Alpha, Beta, Gamma release system. Alpha releases have gone through extensive internal testing before being released, but are considered unstable releases for testing only. Beta releases represent a feature freeze, with only bug fixes done before release. Gamma releases are release candidates, and the window between a gamma release and the final release of a version can be very short.
MySQL InnoDB tables are fully ACID compliant, and have row level record locking. Two common criticisms of MySQL are that it lacks those features. It does have them, and has had them for quite some time. InnoDB also supports clustered indexes and foreign keys with cascading deletes.
Some of the new features of MySQL 4.1 include sub-selects, OpenGIS geometric data storage and prepared statements. In 4.1 you can also specify a different character sets for each field.
MySQL AB Is expecting to have some big new features ready for version 5, including stored procedures and triggers. They’ve also bought a company working on clustering technology, and expect to have that integrated as a storage engine in version 5. We also saw a screen shot of the graphical administration tools that are on the way and these are also targeted for version 5 as well. MySQL AB expects to have version 5 released in the July to September timeframe.