Michal Hrušecký

Currently there are several MySQL versions released by SUN. Latest version marked as stable is MySQL 5.1. This version is in build service for some time already and you may noticed that it is on it's way to Factory (no yet there, but working on it). Other newer releases are 5.4 and 6.0. 5.4 is currently in beta stage and date of stable release should be announced later this year. 6.0 is in alpha stage and it might take quite some time till it will be released as stable.

So what? Well, recently I mentioned splitting server: database repository and creating UNSTABLE branch. One reason to do this was to provide a place where experimental version of MySQL can live. And so I packaged 5.4 and it is now available in server: database: UNSTABLE repository. Why you might be interested in testing MySQL 5.4? According to the release notes, main difference between 5.1 and 5.4 are performance and scalability improvements.

Why you should be afraid of testing it? Well, officially it's beta. So even SUN doesn't recommend it for production servers. And I didn't have time to test it myself yet more deeply. I packaged it, fix few minor things so it will get built and tested if it runs. You may found something missing or somewhere else that you would expect. If you encounter some error, let me know and I'll take a closer look at it Once I'll settle all urgent things, I'll take a deeper look at this package.

After some discussions which happened on mailing list lately, I decided that server: database repository can use some more adjustments. Some people complained about changes I introduced with MySQL 5.1. One point of view is that using factory version on production server is a bad idea but on the other hand, where would you get something newer for your old openSUSE to let it survive a little bit longer before upgrade to newer version? I'd like to introduce following repository scheme which should solve these problems...

server: database: STABLE

This repository will contain last officially released version of some server database related packages. Purpose of this repository will be mainly to provide new stable packages to users of old distributions and possibly as a repository with minor fixes which are too minor to get to the official update.

server: database: FACTORY

Packages in this repository will be intended for the next version of openSUSE release. They should be quite stable but generally much less tested then packages from STABLE repository. Version updates can occur and sometimes something can be a little bit broken.

server: database: UNSTABLE

As name suggests, this repository is mainly for testing. It's purpose is to contain highly experimental packages not intended for next openSUSE release. It may contain alpha or beta version. Purpose is to be prepared for possible problems when package became stable and we would like to include it in openSUSE. Or maybe to test some highly experimental settings of existing packages.

Summary

Now you may choose by yourself how stable/new database you want. Well not really now as I created these repositories just today and I didn't put all packages in them yet and as Build Service is currently heavily loaded I think it will take some time to get everything built... But you can be prepared and you can know what you can expect in near future. And you probably also can add repository of your choice already

Some of you may already notice, that in Build Service, there are already available rpms for new MySQL 5.1. Currently I think that in openSUSE 11.2 will be some 5.1 version of MySQL. So it may be interesting to tell our users what will change and how. Most of these changes are reflected in README.SuSE, but frankly - who reads READMEs?

Changes

Plugins

One of the new features in MySQL 5.1 is support for plugins. So some of the storage engines will be now shipped like that. Following plugins will be available:

• archive
• blackhole
• federated
• example

As you can see, InnoDB will be still compiled as internal part of MySQL. If you are upgrading from version 5.0.X or if this is your first installation of MySQL 5.1, all plugins will be enabled by default and you can disable them manually later (see manual). All these plugins are installed by main mysql rpm so you don't need to install anything special. And if you don't like them, you can disable them easily and completely

With this change you need to remove skip-federated option from your my.cnf file if you have changed it manually. This option was there by default in previous versions of MySQL. But if you are installing MySQL for the first time or if you didn't touch your configuration file, everything should be ok.

File locations

There are going to be some changes in files locations too. Most of them was made in default configuration file so if you are experiencing problems and you have made some manual adjustments to your /etc/my.cnf, try to merge this file with /etc/my.cnf.rpmnew.

First of them is that mysql socket file and pid file were moved by default from /var/lib/mysql to more reasonable location ( /var/run/mysql ). Second change is that mysql log file is again back in /var/log. These changes should make MySQL more LSB friendly and help people with their MySQL administration. All these changes can be reverted by changing MySQL configuration file so if you don't like it, you can move them anywhere you want

BerkeleyDB

Other important change is that MySQL no longer contains BerkeleyDB as storage engine. There is no fix for that and if you used it before, you have to migrate your data to different storage engine.

MySQL Upgrade Log

Last thing you may find useful is that if you missed messages displayed during automatic MySQL database upgrade, you can find them from now on in /var/log/mysql_upgrade.log.

Summary

Just summarization of what you can expect. You wouldn't be able to use BerkeleyDB any longer. And if you are experiencing any problems, it's probably because you changed your configuration manually so solution is to replace /etc/my.cnf by /etc/my.cnf.rpmnew