Man, getting my “emerge -uvDp world” email this morning did not make my day. I see that MySQL is getting pushed to mysql-5.0.26-r1. I’m currently running with the 4 branch (mysql-4.1.21). Now the upgrade has some good associated to it. Stored procedures are supported in MySQL 5 which is great. I did a lot of work with SQLServer 7 and 2000 and definitely miss those days of storedprocs. Also, there is a super annoying bug going around with mysql-4.1.21 that involves ORDER BY and DISTINCT causing unexpected behavior. I also believe that this affects GROUP BY which I’m also noticing. I know that the MySQL team released 4.1.22 to address this problem, so I’m not 100% sure why Gentoo wants to push to the 5 branch now. As of this post mysql-4.1.22 is not in portage.

Man, getting my “emerge -uvDp world” email this morning did not make my day. I see that MySQL is getting pushed to mysql-5.0.26-r1. I’m currently running with the 4 branch (mysql-4.1.21). Now the upgrade has some good associated to it. Stored procedures are supported in MySQL 5 which is great. I did a lot of work with SQLServer 7 and 2000 and definitely miss those days of storedprocs. Also, there is a super annoying bug going around with mysql-4.1.21 that involves ORDER BY and DISTINCT causing unexpected behavior. I also believe that this affects GROUP BY which I’m also noticing. I know that the MySQL team released 4.1.22 to address this problem, so I’m not 100% sure why Gentoo wants to push to the 5 branch now. As of this post mysql-4.1.22 is not in portage.

I personally love Gentoo, but when it comes to this, it is often sketchy. My fear is two fold. The first concern, is converting data from 4 to 5, and possibly causing application problems for all of my hosted sites. This would not be good. The second is to do all the work and then find out that Gentoo wants to downgrade this to 4.1.22 because there was a mistake in portage. I’ve seen this happen before, and it’s a concern. I think I’ll do some research on the upgrade process and figure out some of the ‘gotchas’ before I actually commit. Also, I’ll give it a few days in case portage wants to roll back before committing to any major changes. Either way, I’ll report what I find and post a procedure on how to migrate from 4.1.21 to 5.0.26.