Invitation to test MariaDB 5.1 release candidate

We have now released MariaDB 5.1.41 RC for download and testing. You can download it here. It should be a drop in replacement for any recent MySQL 5.1 release.

We currently have tar archives available and we should have many package formats available shortly.

MariaDB 5.1 is based on MySQL 5.1 codebase, which has been GA for a year now. Most of the things we have included in addition to the vanilla 5.1 code upstream from Sun/MySQL (more on this below) have also been available in the community for quite a long time, so we are quite confident that this is a very stable release; however, being conservative we have had a four month Beta cycle before now going to RC.

I would now like to invite everyone in the community to download and test this release, and if the feedback is good will we then rapidly release a Final release.

On the Askmonty website you can find more information about what's included in MariaDB 5.1. But here are some highlights:

Storage engines

XtraDB replaces InnoDB so you get the Google and Percona enhancements built-in, no need to load it as a plugin. Basically this gives you most of the performance of the upcoming MySQL 5.4 today.

PBXT is included, I'm really happy that this interesting engine finally can get wider adoption thanks to being included and fully supported in MariaDB.

FederatedX by Patrick Galbraith and Antony Curtis is included. This replaces the old Federated from Sun which is not actively maintained by anymore.

And then of course we have Maria, which finally brings you MyISAM users crash safe tables.

Other highlights

The pool of threads feature is based on code from the canceled MySQL 6.0 release. This is good if you have lots of connections to your database and/or you have many short lived queries.

Table elimination is a feature done for a Monty Program customer, that optimizes certain kinds of joins.

In our effort to actively include all the patches floating around in the MySQL community, we have in 5.1 included Microslow and Microsec process patches from Percona. In 5.2 we will continue to include similar patches, there are still many of them floating around the MySQL community that have not yet found their way into a GA release.

We have also done speed improvements, fixed a lot of bugs, added extensions and added more information in the logs.

Please provide your feedback to the maria-developers@lists.launchpad.net list or join us on the #maria IRC channel on Freenode. The more testers we get the faster we can release a final version!