James Rogers wrote:
> I should mention that I don't want to sound like an Oracle cheerleader,
> because I am not. In fact, I have had a lot of reservations about certain
> features (or lack thereof) in Oracle for some time. Fortunately, the
James, as a professional, what is your assessment of recently released
MySQL 3.23 as compared to Oracle and other (OpenSource) competitors?
http://www.mysql.com/news/article-54.html
MySQL 3.23 Declared Stable
2001/01/22
MySQL, the worlds most widely used Open Source Database,
version
3.23, is now declared stable. It's been almost two years since
the previous
version 3.22 was declared stable in January 1999. This means
that
MySQL 3.23 can now be safely used in production environments.
Version 3.23 was released under the GNU GPL-license in June
2000 and
has been available in several pre-stable versions ever since.
Apart from being more stable, more optimized and more portable,
the
MySQL 3.23 release has several major features not present in
the 3.22
or 3.21 releases. These include: full-text search, replication
between a
master and many slaves and several new table handlers that
support large
files and transactions by using the Berkeley DB library from
Sleepycat
Software to implement transaction-safe tables.
Chief developer Michael "Monty" Widenius and the MySQL
Development Team will now focus on the upcoming 4.0 version of
MySQL. The only future changes in version 3.23 will include bug
fixes
and some fine tuning of the replication and BerkeleyDB code.
To download MySQL 3.23:
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-3.23.html
For a complete changelog of MySQL 3.23:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/N/e/News-3.23.x.html
To upgrade from MySQL 3.22:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/U/p/Upgrading-from-3.22.html
Below is a list of the major new features in MySQL 3.23:
New Table Handlers
MyISAM is a new SQL tuned ISAM library. MyISAM is the
now the default for MySQL tables (MySQL 3.23 is still
backwards compatible with ISAM). MyISAM provides
increased performance and support for 64bit OS's (thus
supporting large files).
BDB is the Berkeley Database table type. BDB adds
support
for SQL transactions (COMMIT, ROLLBACK). Thus
allowing BDB tables to survive crashes. BDB tables
also
support page-level locking.
HEAP tables are new in-memory table types. They can be
used for extremely fast look-up tables.
MERGE tables are a collection of identical MyISAM
tables
that can be used as one for SELECT, DELETE, UPDATE
statements. MERGE tables can help you manage a set of
large
log tables -- helping to bypass many constraints
associated
with large tables.
Any of these table types can be mixed and matched for use
in
MySQL 3.23 (specified at the CREATE TABLE ...
TYPE={MYISAM, BDB, HEAP, MERGE} SQL statement). This
gives Database Administrators the option to have the most
optimized database setup to suit their specific needs.
Replication
One way replication can be used is to increase both
robustness and
speed. For robustness two (or more) systems can used to
switch to a
backup server if you have problems with the master. The
extra
speed is achieved by sending part of the non-updating
queries to the
replica server.
Replication can also benefit database backup operations.
Live
backups of the system can be done on a slave instead of a
master,
eliminating potential problems and possible downtime.
Full-text Search
MySQL 3.23 now has full-text indexing and searching
capabilities.
This allows you to search your vast databases of textual
information, with queries returning search string
occurrence/relevance.
Online Table Maintenance
MySQL 3.23 now incorporates many of the table maintanence
features of the (previously only external) utilities
`(my)isamchk'
directly into the MySQL server.
The use of these newly incorporated features can help to
eliminate
system downtime, by allowing the Database Administrator to
repair
damaged tables without shutting-down the MySQL server.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:25 MDT