De alombekende Open Source database MySQL, waar onder andere tweakers.net op draait is eindelijk stabiel verklaard. Het heeft bijna twee jaar geduurd sinds 3.22, die in januari 1999 stabiel werd verklaard. Naast dat het programma natuurlijk een stuk stabieler is geworden, heeft MySQL 3.23 ook een aantal grotere features erbij gekregen die niet te vinden waren in 3.22 of 3.21. De hoofd-ontwikkelaar Michael "Monty" Widenius en de rest van het MySQL development team gaan zich nu concentreren op versie 4.0. Hieronder een gedeelte uit het artikel:
Below is a list of the major new features in MySQL 3.23:
- New Table Handlers
Any of these table types can be mixed and matched for use in MySQL 3.23 (specified at the CREATE TABLE ... TYPE=" rel="external">MYISAM, BDB, HEAP, MERGE SQL statement). This gives Database Administrators the option to have the most optimized database setup to suit their specific needs.
- 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.
- 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.
Martin Sturm was de eerste die ons hiervan op de hoogte bracht.