MySQL 4.0.12 Ready to Roll

MySQL AB, which hawks a popular open source
database to shake market share loose from such entrenched industry mainstays
as Oracle and IBM, said Tuesday its flagship product is ready for public use
and supports Intel Itanium 2 processors running Linux.


The Swedish concern said MySQL 4.0.12 passed a series of tests with no fatal
bugs and then completed so-called battle-testing, in which the software was
heavily taxed in live environments for about three months.


MySQL version 4.0 is now the
standard code base for all MySQL database downloads. Available under the
Free Software/Open Source GNU General Public License (GPL) or a non-GPL
commercial license, MySQL has been gaining momentum, boasting 4 million
installations, including such high-profile customers as Yahoo!, Lucent and
Sony.


MySQL AB CTO and co-founder Michael “Monty” Widenius said development
releases of MySQL version 4.0 have been available since October, 2001. But
with the latest version, Widenius said thousands of users tested it and no
serious bugs have been found in months.


The new MySQL 4.0 includes features geared to handle heavily-trafficked
database systems, including a query cache, full-text indexing, an embedded
MySQL server library, new transactional engine, as well as features to make
migration from say, IBM’s DB2 or Oracle’s 9i database, easier.


MySQL AB pledged continued support for the previous production release,
version 3.23 until further notice.


As for the optimization on Intel Itanium 2 platforms and Linux, MySQL
representatives say it’s no problem.


Sam Al-Schamma, director of European Developer Programs at MySQL, said
Itanium 2 capabilities targeted at large databases, data mining and other
enterprise applications “for which MySQL is increasingly being used as the
database engine.”


The news is indicative of the company’s desire to broaden MySQL’s reach
across the enterprise. Adding support for Linux/Itanium, along with its
previous support for all major Linux distributions as well as Unix, Mac OS X
and Windows operating systems, should help toward this end.

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