iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

As you may already know or soon will find out MySQL had released a new version of their community server, 5.0.33. First all congratulations to developers, any release is a lot of work and finally pushing it out the public is definitely an achievement.

There are however some interesting and in my eyes less then positive developments pertaining to this release. As you can see from Kaj's announcement as well as the state of the MySQL's download page pre-compiled binaries are no longer offered. The only files available for MySQL 5.0.33 are sources for *NIX and Windows platforms.

While this is not an issue for *NIX users where lack of binaries will be resolved by distros and if not, the compiler is always available and compiling MySQL is big issue, it does pose a major problem for Windows users who generally do not have access to a C/C++ compiler. This means that all the people who develop on Win32 and then deploy on *NIX machines will need to stick to older versions of the database for the dev environments or rely on someone other then MySQL to provide binaries (which may result is less then stable, trustworthy packages going around). This also may affect adoption rates since many companies insist (and rightly so) on using same version of DB on production and development.

Interestingly enough the "For maximum stability and performance, we recommend that you use the binaries we provide." statement on the download page still remains. I guess the suggestion is that if we (the users) want stability we need to go for the Enterprise edition.