While you were eating turkey over Thanksgiving weekend, everyone’s favorite database (MySQL) walked into a New York nightclub and accidentally shot itself in the leg. Oh wait, that was Giant’s star receiver, Plaxico Burress. But nonetheless,  over the very same holiday weekend, MySQL pulled out their gat and fired a round in their own leg.

Michael Widenuis, the founder and original developer of MySQL wrote a blog post titled “Oops, we did it again (MySQL 5.1 released as GA with crashing bugs).” For some bizarre reason, the billion dollar database released a major update, without fixing or updating any of the major bugs.

Why? How? What? Huh?

Let’s ask Michael: “The reason I am asking you to be very cautious about MySQL 5.1 is that there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.

• We still have 20 known and tagged crashing and wrong result bugs in 5.1 35 more if we add the known crashing bugs from 5.0 that are likely to also be present in 5.1.
• We still have more than 180 serious bugs (P2) in 5.1. Some of these can be found here.
• We have more than 300 known and verified less critical bugs that are not going to be addressed soon. (The total reported number of bugs to the MySQL server is of course much larger).”

So where does this leave MySQL? Pretty much at the same place Plaxico is at with the Giants. That is TBD. The difference is MySQL is still widely used, free and gets the job done. It has its flaws but I can use it as the backbone of my websites and web applications. Plaxico hasn’t played well since the first game this season. He was crucial for the Giant’s throughout the playoffs last year, especially in the Super Bowl. But this year he has crashed, truncated and costs 35 million. The Giants, at a league leading 11 – 1, seem to be doing just fine without him.

No matter what happens, I am looking forward to making it drizzle.