Even with all the drama surrounding Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun and critics' concerns about its impact on Oracle's open source database competition, Sun developers are still hard at work on MySQL. One of the fruits of their labors is the recent MySQL 5.5 milestone 2 development release, which introduces many new features to the open source database -- some of which were originally intended for MySQL 6.0.

MySQL has been talking about the MySQL 6.0 release for nearly two years. The most recent generally available stable release from MySQL is the 5.1 release, which debuted a year ago after both delay and controversy.

After the 5.1 release, MySQL developers changed the model for rolling out new releases to encourage a rapider and more stable release cycle. Since then, that's culminated in some features earmarked for 6.0 making their appearance early.

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"As part of this new model, we've brought many of the planned 6.0 features forward into MySQL 5.5," Sun spokesperson Steve Curry told InternetNews.com> "There will certainly be a MySQL 6.0 in the future, but we have yet to determine what its new reorganized feature set will be."

Curry said he believes users will be excited about a number of features in the MySQL 5.5 milestone, including performance and scalability enhancements.

MySQL 5.5 also introduces semi-synchronous replication, which will offer MySQL users a replication choice apart from the current default of asynchronous replication.

"A commit performed on the master side blocks before returning to the session that performed the transaction until at least one slave acknowledges that it has received and logged the events for the transaction," the MySQL 5.5 release notes state. In contrast, with asynchronous replication, the master side will write an event without first knowing if the replicating slave has actually processed the event.

MySQL 5.5 also adds what Curry referred to as enhanced partitioning syntax. There are a number of new database-portioning options available in MySQL 5.5, including the user-defined RANGE COLUMNS partitioning option.

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