Sun Microsystems is going to launch a major update to the open-source database MySQL next week at the MYSQL Conference in Santa Clara.  The release named MySQL 5.1 is the first major announcement post MySQL’s acquisition by Sun and was supposed to happen in the Q1 of 2008.

Through the new release which has several new features, Sun wants to make MySQL more suitable for critical applications at large enterprises.  The new features in MySQL 5.1 include partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering.  With these features, the update looks more of a catching up effort to match the MySQL offerings with those of the biggies like Oracle and Microsoft.

About the new release, Zack Urlocker, vice president for MySQL products at Sun, says

5.1, though it sounds like an incremental release, has got some pretty major features.  Probably, we should have called it 6.0, because there’s so much stuff in there and we’ve been working on it for a couple of years.

Apart from the new features, Sun has fixed a lot of previous bugs in MySQL which has supposedly increased the performance by 20 per cent.  In this way, the MySQL 5.1 is packed with greater reliability, scalability and efficiency making it better than its previous versions for running big and busy websites.

An issue which MySQL developers currently face is the lack of a native transactional engine for MySQL since InnoDB is now owned by Oracle and MySQL’s Falcon still under development with no signs of getting released in this quarter.  Sun might reveal some plans around Falcon during the conference apart from its version of MySQL’s development roadmap.

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