Eric Bergen

When I received and email almost two years ago about a announcement that MySQL was going to release and enterprise product I was very excited. I was looking forward to a redhat style model of vetting releases in the community then offering a proven stable version to paying customers. I saw it as a great way to for MySQL to generate revenue as well as eliminate the need for people to stay a few releases back from the head and guess when to upgrade.

The release shocked me. What was originally emailed to me and the final plan were two very different things. It was a plan to hand paying customers bleeding edge code that had been tested only by MySQL’s QA team. It seems MySQL has forgotten the years of testing by millions of community members that has given MySQL the stability we have grown to trust. I predicted the instability of MySQL enterprise back in October ‘06 by saying that releasing patches in enterprise that hadn’t been tested by the community would result in instable releases being delivered to paying customers. These should always be tested by the community first.

MySQL 5.0.48 enterprise is rock solid proof that the release cycle MySQL chose to implement is completely broken. It was released then pulled due to some very basic sorting functionality being broken. I hope they’re working to change the release cycle to more of a redhat model both to put trust back in the community for testing and to give enterprise customers the stable version they’re paying for.