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I've been trying to be cautious and not adopt early. I am an Enterprise Gold subscriber. I have app clusters for each of Python/Django, Ruby on Rails, and PHP (mostly WordPress). (edit: All servers are Linux.) I'm now considering taking the plunge. I have hosts to spare, so it's not the logistics of the conversion that I fear. (Unless you have a 5.0 Master + 5.1 Slave horror story to share.) I was reluctant due to a rant by Monty, but I really want a few of the new features. (Especially the additions to the information_schema.) I'm a full time DBA, so I like knowing what is happening to my servers and my data. I work for a news organization, so we don't have the freedom to experience down time like your average LAMP user. It feels like the time for 5.1 has come.

What say you?

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If you have a compelling reason for doing so, go ahead when you get the mandate to spend the (large amount of) time. If I was your boss I'd like to know a really good reason for taking a lot of time and risk.

Upgrading a component like MySQL is going to be a massive piece of work, especially performance testing.

In any case, it really depends how well your application is covered by automated test cases, and how complex your release process is. But upgrading a database sounds like the kind of thing that requires every test possible.

You would at a minimum want to performance test critical parts of your application and do some soak / stress testing also to make sure you're not using it in some way which will blow the machine up over time.

Depending on how much data you have (and what the redundancy / downtime requirements of your app are; how big your maintenance windows can be etc), the logistics of the conversion may or may not be an issue.

I'd say that testing is much harder than logistics of a migration, even if the logistics are nontrivial. I recently upgraded from 4.1 to 5, and the project took ~ 6 months, mostly because the testing was hard. We found almost no bugs caused by the MySQL upgrade though.

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  • We have ~25 apps on the 3 platforms mentioned. Nearly all of them see new releases at least every 3 weeks. Most of them several times a week, and a few several times a day during sprints. I think the developers could weed out anything on the dev/staging env. Since they all use ORM's I can't imagine any issues. Better query optimization, and index selection are only behavior changes I foresee in the handling of the kind of SQL generated by these ORM's. I'm more concerned with: Has MySQL 5.1 proven itself yet? Jun 22, 2009 at 12:31
  • If you're prepared to push the onus on to developers to make their applications compatible with 5.1, fine. Each dev team would need to do a release which is compatible with 5.0 AND 5.1, and do all the necessary QA work to ensure that this is the case, and once you have those apps fully tested and out the door (all of them), you can schedule the upgrade. Sounds like your developers release stuff too often.
    – MarkR
    Jun 23, 2009 at 10:07

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