MySQL Creator Says 5.1 has “fatal bugs”
Over the past several weeks I've been mulling over the MySQL/PostgreSQL and PHP trifecta in my head. Wondering if I needed to just give in and switch to MySQL as it was/is supported by the PHP Apache plugin from Apple. It would certainly make good sense. Then this morning I read this article and I'm glad I didn't.
In the article, MySQL creator Michael Widenius is quoted from his personal blog:
"We still have 20 known and tagged crashing and wrong result bugs in 5.1 [and] 35 more if we add the known crashing bugs from 5.0 that are likely to also be present in 5.1," he wrote. "It's of course impossible to get all issues fixed, but we should at least have tried to ensure that all issues important to a lot of MySQL developers and MySQL users should have been discussed, fixed and/or addressed in a public manner! We should also never have a single serious crashing/wrong data bug in a GA release."
This sounds like a serious quality control issue until you read later that it's systemic to the MySQL group at Sun. Again, from the article:
Despite the alleged friction between prominent MySQL developers and Sun management, Widenius contends that Sun was not responsible for the failures behind the 5.1 release. He blames Mårten Mickos, the senior vice president of Sun's database group and former CEO of MySQL AB. According to Widenius, Mickos no longer treats quality as a priority and unilaterally chose a premature GA release date because "he needs something he can sell."
While I can understand the need to sell a product in Sun's corporate environment, it seems more reasonable to have smaller, more stable releases, as opposed to adding in all the amazing new features in 5.1 just to have something that's feature-rich for the selling. It's certainly not where PostgreSQL is right now, and given this, I think it was the right thing to do, and continues to be the right thing to stick with.
I was hoping that Sun would take MySQL to a new level... but maybe it was a new low. Sigh.