Trouble in MySQL Land

This amuses me to no end. Today, on Slashdot, Ars Technica, and other sites, there has been a story circulating about a blog post by Michael Widenius, one of the core developers of MySQL. The core of his post is that there are a series of significant bugs in the 5.1 release which should have been dealt with before declaring General Availability. My first thought was, "wait a minute, don't I have 5.1 on my mail server?":

kibble:~ andrew$ pkg_info | grep mysql-server
mysql-server-5.1.29 Multithreaded SQL database (server)

Looks like the FreeBSD ports tree has included MySQL 5.1 for quite some time, alongside 5.0. At some point long ago I must have installed 5.1 without realizing it was still a Release Candidate. Luckily for me the database isn't used for much other than SpamAssassin and the occasional testing site for Drupal. For the vast majority of MySQL instances, none of the bugs being discussed will come into play. So, if you're running a "normal" MySQL instance to host your blog or website, I wouldn't worry about any issues while upgrading.