Confusing Sun communication about MySQL 5.4
By Osma on Tuesday 12 May 2009, 17:01 - Permalink
Just received an email newsletter from Sun titled "MySQL 5.4 Preview Release" which states:
Sun Microsystems recently released MySQL 5.4, delivering performance and scalability improvements enabling the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers.
MySQL 5.4 also includes new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements, resulting in 90% better response times for certain queries.
Apparently, the confusion about the contents of the release I wrote about earlier continue to reign inside Sun as well. MySQL 5.4 has not been released by any reasonable meaning of the word, since there's "only" a preview available at this time. Compare this to Windows 7: that's already a Release Candidate, but it has not been released. Also, the preview release available does not include new subquery optimizations nor JOIN improvements. Having planned such improvements doesn't count.
As I wrote earlier, the best of the rather bad excuses for the release labeling offered to me was that Sun wanted to avoid confusion by not releasing many versions at once. I think that got replaced (and then some) by plenty of extra confusion about when and what was released, instead. Sorry, no good. Try again, 'kthxbye.
Comments
"Release" has always meant "available to the public" in the MySQL world. That's why they qualify things as "Alpha release" or "Beta release" or "Release Candidate release" or "Generally available release".
It's not actually confusion. And they've called it a "preview release" which means it's not a GA (Generally available, what you consider a "release") release.
One of the differences between open source and closed source is that closed source pre-GA releases are usually to a limited audience.
So the confusion is mostly yours, but I'd think that "preview release" should clear up the intention.
Sheeri, while you are technically correct, I kind of sympatise with Osma. "Announce" would have been a better word. "Announcements" are marketing, you can do announcements safely each user conference or any other time, even if the actual release is some other time. The main point is that with Open Source we should release things all the time, so that in itself is no-news. OTOH, marketing a Preview or Beta is in itself of course ok, but that qualifier should be included in the text.
(Note however the reliable MySQL Cluster team: They actually released 7.0 GA when it was released... ahem, *announced*.)
We could quibble indefinitely about the definitions for words like announce, release and availability, but as far as I can see, the facts are:
* MySQL (community) release vocabulary does not follow the open source practices of a "release" being a packaged set of pre-existing functionality tested already in various combinations of vcs builds and snapshots.
* MySQL (enterprise) release vocabulary does not follow the de-facto practice of closed-source software releases either, since the release announcements do not correlate to either availability nor future roadmap.
The other sentence I quoted from that email, which to my best reading of what you wrote, Sheeri,, highlights the issue. I would not complain if the message would have advertised the availability of a prerelease and its functionalities, or if it had discussed an announced future release and made it clear what is not yet available. My complaint is that it confuses, intentionally or accidentally, the messages together and makes it seem as if the available preview release contains the announced features, which it does not.
I already discussed earlier why I think it's stupid that 5.4 full release is delayed pending incomplete features, so I'm not repeating that argument here.