MySQL 5.1.3-alpha has been released

[Kent Boortz]

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 done its best 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,
	kent

-- 
Kent Boortz, Senior Software Developer
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com
Office: [phone] ext. 4450 (VoIP)
Office: [phone]
Mobile: [phone]