The first decision to make is whether someone want to use a
production (stable) release or a development release. In the
MySQL development process, multiple release series co-exist, each
at a different stage of maturity:
At the time of writing this:
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MySQL 5.4 and 6.0 are the current development release series.
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MySQL 5.1 is the current General Availability (Production) release series. New releases are issued for bugfixes only; no new features are being added that could affect stability.
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MySQL 5.0 is the previous stable (production-quality) release series.
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MySQL 4.1, 4.0, and 3.23 are old stable (production-quality) release series. MySQL 4.1 is now at the end of the product lifecycle. Active development and support for these versions has ended. …