More than a week after declaring the open-source database production-ready, Sun Microsystems has officially announced the general availability of the MySQL 5.1 database. In production for three years, MySQL 5.1 includes a number of new features aimed at improving performance, including partitioning functionality, row-based replication and a new plug-in API.

As regards the controversy that surfaced regarding the number of bugs still present in the database, Sun officials defended the company decision, highlighting some of MySQL 5.1's features and speaking about the Falcon storage engine and backup utility coming in Version 6.0.

The controversy erupted last week after MySQL founder, Monty Widenius, noted a number of bugs had not been fixed, and advised enterprises to take a cautious approach to deployment. Nevertheless, there have been more than 250,000 downloads, in the past ten days, indicating strong interest in the open-source database. Having the option to partition tables five ways puts MySQL on more of an equal footing with commercial systems, especially those used in assembling large data sets in data warehouses.

MySQL database administrators may now partition both tables and indexes by range - an approach that is often used to isolate sales results by month or implement other distinct time frames or sets of numbers. Along with range partitioning, the other forms of partitioning now available are list partitioning, harsh partitioning, key partitioning and composite partitioning.

MySQL has added more sophisticated replication as well. It typically is set up as a master MySQL database replicating to "slave" or subsystems that await synchronization by the master. If a function is executed on the master system, then the same function gets executed on the slave systems afterward to maintain data integrity.