MySQL 5.1.3-alpha has been released

[Joerg Bruehe]

Hi,

MySQL 5.1.3, a new version of the popular Open Source Database
Management System, has been released. The Community Edition is now
available in source and binary form for a number of platforms from our
download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html and
mirror sites.

As we're working on making some changes to how we will provide binary
distributions of MySQL 5.1, this release currently only provides "Max"
binaries for a few selected platforms.

Note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point in time - 
if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or
choose another download site.

This is the first public alpha release of the current MySQL 5.1
development branch, providing an insight to upcoming features. While
some of these are still under heavy development, this release includes
the following new features and changes (in comparison to the current
MySQL 5.0 production release):


  - Partitioning, which allows distributing portions of individual tables
    across a filesystem, according to rules which can be set when the
    table is created. In effect, different portions of a table are stored
    as separate tables in different locations - but from the user
    point-of-view, the partitioned table is still a single table. See
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioning.html for further
    information on this functionality. (Author: Mikael Ronström)

  - MySQL 5.1 will add support for a very flexible plugin API, that will
    allow the loading and unloading of various components at runtime,
    without restarting the server. While the work on this is not finished
    yet, Pluggable Full-Text parsers are a first step in this direction.
    This allows the user to implement his own input filter on the indexed
    text, enabling full-text search capability on arbitrary data like PDF
    files or other document formats. A pre-parser full-text plugin
    performs the actual parsing and extraction of the text and hands it
    over to the builtin MySQL full-text search.
    (Author: Sergey Vojtovich)

  - The Instance Manager (IM) now has some additional functionality:
      * SHOW <instance_name> LOG FILES - provides a listing of all log
        files used by the instance
      * SHOW <instance_name> LOG {ERROR | SLOW | GENERAL} size -
        retrieves a part of the specified log file
      * SET instance_name.option_name=option_value - sets an option to
        the specified value and writes it to the config file
    See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/instance-manager.html for
    more details on these new commands. (Author: Petr Chardin)

  - Two new aggregate functions STDDEV_POP and STDDEV_SAMP for computing
    the population and sample standard deviation of expressions - see
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/group-by-functions.html for
    more info. (Author: Sergey Vojtovich)

  - The performance of boolean full-text searches (using the "+"
    Operator) has been improved. See
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-search.html
    for more details about full-text searching.
    (Author: Sergey Vojtovich)

  - VARCHAR fields used in MySQL Cluster tables are now variable-sized;
    that is, they now only allocate as much space as required to store
    the data. Previously, a VARCHAR(n) field allocated n+2 bytes (aligned
    to 4 bytes), regardless if the actual inserted value required that
    much space. (In other words, a VARCHAR column always required the
    same, fixed amount of storage as a CHAR column of the same size.)

  - Added the "table_definition_cache" system variable. If you use a
    large number of tables, you can create a large table definition cache
    to speed up opening of tables. The table definition cache takes less
    space and does not use file descriptors, unlike the normal table
    cache.

  - The "table_cache" system variable was renamed to "table_open_cache".
    Any scripts that refer to "table_cache" should be updated to use the
    new name.

   NOTE: This alpha release, as any other pre-production release, should
   not be installed on "production" level systems or systems with
   critical data. It is good practice to back up your data before
   installing any new version of software. Although MySQL has worked very
   hard to ensure a high level of quality, protect your data by making a
   backup as you would for any other software alpha release.)

We welcome feedback and bug reports about these new features via our
public bug tracking system at http://bugs.mysql.com/ . Thank you for
your support!

Bye,
	LenZ & Jörg

-- 
Lenz Grimmer, Senior Production Engineer
Joerg Bruehe, Senior Production Engineer
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com