MySQL 5 Upgrade (Saturday August 4th)
This coming Saturday (August 4th), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database software on all our servers from version 4.1.11 to version 5.0.32 (plus appropriate security updates). MySQL 5 adds many features that customers have requested, and some Web site scripts now require it.
The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.
If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.
MySQL 5 has been available for over a year and is now the standard, recommended version, according to the company that makes MySQL. Any modern script that uses databases should work properly with MySQL 5, but we should mention that we’ve heard reports of MySQL 5 database incompatibilities with a very small number of older scripts. That’s why you may want to check with the authors of any scripts on your site to verify that they are compatible with MySQL 5, as we’ve previously suggested.
If you’re a technically advanced customer and you want to know exactly what changes need to be considered for this upgrade, the MySQL 4.1 to 5.0 upgrade page has plenty of gory details. Where possible, we’ve taken care of the obvious things (for example, we’ve already converted any ISAM tables to MyISAM), but there’s a long list of rarer, subtler issues that are impossible for us to check without examining each SQL query that a script makes.
Although we don’t expect any problems, we will have senior technicians (who have extensive MySQL experience) on duty Sunday August 5 to help customers with any problems. In the very worst case of a customer using a script that simply will not work with MySQL 5, we are keeping a separate MySQL 4.1 server available that we can temporarily use for that customer’s databases to for up to 30 days, giving such customers a chance to resolve the issue.
By the way, we now also provide a way for your scripts to “know” if any MySQL maintenance is in progress, which gives you a way to make sure that your script displays a graceful error message. See “How can I tell when MySQL maintenance is happening?” for details.
We apologize for any inconvenience this upgrade causes. We tend to be very conservative about major upgrades, and we don’t undertake them lightly, but this one is definitely necessary.
