There has been a lot of buzz about the MySQL 5.5 GA release and its new features and other user-visible improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to touch on a less noticeable, but still important change.

CMake has already been used to build the MySQL Server on Windows for a long time, while the GNU autotools were used on all other platforms. Since MySQL 5.5, all builds on all platforms are now performed using the same tool chain. With the latest release of MySQL 5.5, we've made an important step to clean up and simplify the MySQL build system: the support for autoconf/automake has now …

Today, December 15, 2010, MySQL 5.5.8 was released – and is now generally available.

db4free.net has been updated to 5.5.8 GA.

Read the Introduction to MySQL 5.5 to find out what’s new and … give it a try!

It is my pleasure to announce that MySQL 5.5 is now GA and ready for production deployment.  You can read Oracle's official press release here.

I am excited about 5.5 because of the performance and scalability gains, new replication enhancements and overall improved technical efficiencies.  Congratulations and a sincere "Thanks!" go out to the entire MySQL Community and product engineering teams for making 5.5 the best release of MySQL to date.

Please join us for today's MySQL Technology …

It is my pleasure to announce that MySQL 5.5 is now GA and ready for production deployment.  You can read Oracle's official press release here.

I am excited about 5.5 because of the performance and scalability gains, new replication enhancements and overall improved technical efficiencies.  Congratulations and a sincere "Thanks!" go out to the entire MySQL Community and product engineering teams for making 5.5 the best release of MySQL to date.

Please join us for today's MySQL Technology Update …

Series

What are the chances for a free software cloud?

• Resolving the contradictions between web services, clouds, and open source
• Defining clouds, web services, and other remote computing
• Why clouds and web services will continue to take over computing
• Why web services should be released as free software (12/20)
• Reaching the pinnacle: truly open web services and clouds (12/22)
…

From a stock/standard/typical/desktop install of Linux, it seems these are required in order to build MySQL/MariaDb/Percona forks:

gcc
gcc-c++
automake
libtool
bison
ncurses (Thanks Justin!)

Do apt-get, yum, rpm, emerge, or whatever to get them before doing configure, make and such. I am missing one, and I think it has “curse” or something like that in its name. Will update this post when I find that out.

I have been looking forward to the general availability (GA) release of MySQL 5.5 since is was publically announced in September that we would see this in 2010. While I already have a production client with 5.5.7rc, the badge of general availability is a great way to promote why environments should consider moving to using MySQL 5.5. Here is my quick short list of why I’d promote moving to MySQL 5.5.

1. Improved integration

The first significant improvement is that InnoDB is now again firmly a default included storage engine. The InnoDB plugin 1.1.x is now the builtin version of the engine, not a plugin version. Also the 1.1.x version has continued improvements over the 1.0.x version available as an included but not enabled plugin in current MySQL 5.1.x versions. Removing the complexity for end users over the choice of InnoDB and the necessary configuration changes is a great simplification. The introduction in the InnoDB plugin …

Oracle Magazine features editor Rich Schwerin interviews Tomas Ulin, Vice President, MySQL Engineering, who answers questions about the GA release of MySQL 5.5.

Just yesterday we released Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3 which includes HandlerSocket. This is third-party plugin, developed Inada Naoki, DeNA Co., Ltd and explained in Yoshinori Matsunobu's blog post.

What is so special about it:

• It provides NOSQL-like requests to data stored in XtraDB. So in the same time you can access your data in SQL and NOSQL ways. This is first open source solution which allows that.
• It has persistent storage (XtraDB is persistent)
• It handles really high load. In my tests using 2 dedicated web servers ( using perl clients) I reached 200,000 req/sec and the clients were real bottleneck, while Percona Server was busy only 5-7%. I did not have more clients in my lab to put …

We have received many requests for a client library for MariaDB (and MySQL) under a license other than the GPL, and decided that it's now time to do something about it.

Some time ago we released the LGPL client library used in MySQL 3.23. This can be used by many applications to connect to MariaDB, MySQL, and Drizzle, but doesn't satisfy all the requirements one would like to see for a true replacement for the current GPL client library.

Minimum requirements are:

• It should be binary link level compatible with the current MySQL 5.1 client library. To use it, one would just have to re-link the application with the new library. No re-compilation of the source should be necessary.
• It should have all functionality of the MySQL 5.1 client library (including prepared statements).
• It should be …