Hi!

First: Note that it will take a short while until SourceForge and all mirrors have the new version; Don't email us for a couple of days if you can't find the 3.23.31 version on a mirror!

MySQL 3.23 is now finally released as a production release.

The 3.23 release has several major new features that are not present in the 3.22 or 3.21 releases. We have added two new table types: MyISAM, a new ISAM library which is tuned for SQL and supports large files; and BerkeleyDB which uses the Berkeley DB library from Sleepycat Software to implement transaction-safe tables. The 3.23 release also includes support for database replication between a master and many slaves.

We are in the future aiming to only provide bug fixes for 3.23 and instead concentrate on the 4.0 version.

The replication code and BerkeleyDB code is still not as tested and as the rest of the code, so we will probably need to do a couple of future releases of 3.23 with small fixes for this part of the code. As long as you don't use these features, you should be quite safe with MySQL 3.23!

Note that the above doesn't mean that replication or Berkeley DB doesn't work; We have done a lot of testing of all code, including replication and BDB without finding any problems. It only means that not as many users uses this code as the rest of the code and because of this we are not yet 100 % confident in this code.

We will within a few days start building binaries with BDB table support; We will do a separate announcement when these are available.

Changes in release 3.23.31

--------------------------

* The test suite now tests all reachable BDB interface code. During testing we found and fixed a lot of errors in the interface code.

* Using `HAVING' on an empty table could produce one result row when it shouldn't.

* Fixed that the *MySQL* RPM is not depending on perl5 anymore.

* Fixed some problems with `HEAP' tables on windows.

* `SHOW TABLE STATUS' didn't show correct average row length for tables bigger than 4G.

* `CHECK TABLE .. EXTENED' didn't check row links for fixed size tables.

* Added option `MEDIUM' to `CHECK TABLE'.

* Fixed problem when using `DECIMAL()' keys on negative numbers.

* `HOUR()' (and some other `TIME' functions) on a `CHAR' column always returned `NULL'. * Fixed security bug in something (please upgrade if you are using a earlier MySQL 3.23 version).

* Fixed buffer overflow bug when writing a certain error message.

* Added usage of `getrlimit()' on Linux to get `-O --open-files-limit=#' to work on Linux.

* Added new mysqld variable: bdb_version.

* Fixed bug when using expression of type `SELECT ... FROM t1 left join t2 on (t1.a=t2.a) WHERE t1.a=t2.a'. In this case the test in the `WHERE' clause was wrongly optimized away.

* Fixed bug in `MyISAM' when deleting keys with possible `NULL' values, but the first key-column was not a prefix-compressed text column.

* Fixed that `mysql.server' reads the `mysql.server' option section instead of `mysql_server'.

* Fixed that `safe_mysqld' and `mysql.server' also reads the `server' option section.

* Added `Threads_created' status variable to `mysqld'.

For a complete changelog for 3.23:

http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/manual_News.html#News-3.23.x

For upgrading from 3.22:

http://www.mysql.com/doc/U/p/Upgrading-from-3.22.html

Regards, Monty

PS: We plan to provide patches to MySQL 3.23 for important new features like a new faster key cache, but to keep the 3.23 code stable, we will probably not incorporate these in the standard version 3.23 version.