A fantastic day of Connector releases!

Georg and his MySQL Connectors Team today surprised the MySQL Community and most of his Sun-MySQL colleagues by releasing a "Full House" of Connector releases.

• ODBC 5.1 GA
  
• ODBC 3.51.25 GA update 
  
• Connector/.NET 5.0.9 GA update 
  
• PDO MySQLND preview 
  
• Connector/OpenOffice.org preview 
  

The ODBC 5.1 GA marks a very important milestone for the MySQL Connectors team. ODBC is one of our most popular drivers, yet it is a driver we historically have had problems supporting well. To correct the situation, much of the team has for over a year focused on this new version. A lot of hard work and sleepless nights have been spent while pushing towards this day. A Big Thank You goes to the core team behind it and all the supporters within the MySQL organization.

• Core Team: Georg Richter, Jim Winstead, Jess Balint, Lawrenty Novitsky, Eric Malossi
  
• Supporters: Kent Boortz (Build), Bogdan Degtyariov and Tonci Grgin (Support), and MC Brown (Docs)
  

The ODBC 5.1 is based on the ODBC 3.51 code, so much of the improvement work around ODBC has naturally covered this earlier version as well. I believe we have fixed close to 200-300 bugs in the 3.51 code alone in the last 15 months. We hope we now offer two solid ODBC products which matches the high quality expectations of our users and customers.

The PDO and Connector/OpenOffice.org previews are two new initiatives within the Connectors team. We recognize that part of the PHP community is interested in the benefits of PDO and naturally we want to support them well. We can thank Johannes Schlueter and Andrey Hristov for the coding work and Ulf Wendel for his vigorous testing activity in making this PDO preview happen. The OpenOffice.org support is an exciting initiative within Sun to make it easy to access MySQL Server and its schemata from the office-suite. This is an example of great cross-departmental engineering co-operation between MySQLers and other parts of Sun. Greetings to the OpenOffice.org team in Hamburg who helped us in this work!

Finally I want to highlight the great work by Reggie Burnett. Reggie is our key driver ensuring that MySQL supports well the Microsoft development community, and thanks to him MySQL is very easy to use over .Net and from Microsoft Visual Studio. Thank you for yet another Connector/.Net update that keeps the quality of this important support high.

Workbench 5.0 is GA!

I am very excited about the Workbench 5.0 GA release today, the ultimate Database Modeling Tool for MySQL Developers.

Mike calling to get Workbench GA online.

(about 15 min before Marten's UC keynote starts)

The team has worked extremely hard for the last months, eagerly awaiting this day. Congratulations to Mike Zinner, Alfredo Kojima, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Mike Lischke, Johannes Taxacher, Sergei Tkachenko and Maksym Yehorov for making this happen.

We invite all in the community to try out the product and provide us with feedback.

• The OSS version is available for download from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.0.html
  

• Maybe there is some specific functionality you miss in the product? We invite all our users to enhance the product and build plugins. Guidelines for how easy this is to do, you find on http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/?page_id=10
  

• If you want to get access to some time-saving additional features, we offer the Workbench Standard Edition (soon available for a low cost on shop.mysql.com)
  

Now after the GA release we will first take a moment to celebrate! (and sleep). Thereafter we will start to plan for the next Workbench 5.1 update, which we intend to release still this calendar year. As the planning is still not finalized, we invite your input on what you think we should focus on. Together we can ensure we build the best modeling tool for you.

Post your thoughts and comments for the team in the Workbench forum.

Time to Contribute? - MySQL Community Development Program has been updated

 

MySQL geeks worldwide unite!
 
I am proud to announce that Georg Richter (our Community Engineering Lead) has updated the MySQL Community Development Program.
 

       http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Community_Contributions

 

The updated program gives explicit suggestions for items you can work on, if you want to help out yourself and/or MySQL in development. 

 

We have published a list of Development Worklogs (read: design outlines) and Bugs which we are very interested in getting help with. If you let us know your interest in coding one of the items, we can assign a MySQL developer to guide you in your work. 

 

The intent of this assistance is to help you develop good code for MySQL. We hope this makes your end result function well, and makes it possible to merge your code easily with other MySQL code.

 

The list has been chosen by taking Worklogs for features we would like to include in the next development release, but for which we can't allocate resources currently. They are also of a suitable difficulty level so that we believe an external contributor can succeed in the implementation. 

 

The chosen Bugs are of lower priority which we currently can't allocate a developer on, but which we think can be relevant for a fair amount of users. We also regard them to be of lower to intermediate complexity.

 

We welcome your feedback to the updated program!