Submitted by Bryan on

A debate that is going on among many CMS projects. Ryan Boren asks if it's time for Wordpress to drop support for MySQL 3.23?

WordPress currently requires MySQL 3.23.23 or greater. We’ve long avoid bumping our requirements so that we could accommodate the widest variety of hosting environments. We understand that people don’t want to upgrade a platform that is working just fine for them. However, supporting these older versions adds development and support costs. Recently, a commit went into trunk that bumped the MySQL requirement from 3.23.23 to 4.0 or greater. Considering that MySQL AB is dropping support for 3.23 and no longer provides binary downloads for 3.23, is it time for WordPress to move on? How many of you are still running 3.23?

You also may want to note that he proposes putting minimum support for MySQL starting with version 4.0. Shouldn't we just get through the pain of an upgrade in one try...how about minimum support for MySQL 4.1? I also know some MySQL fanatics that argue most database users should be at MySQL 5.x.

Complete Story


CMS Topics: 

Bookmark/Search this post with

Comments

Drupal

Dries's picture
For what it is worth, Drupal decided to drop support for MySQL 3.23. We simply follow the MySQL product lifecycle. Soon, running MySQL 3.23 might be insecure -- unless you have a service contract with MySQL.

Joomla!

Anonymous's picture
Joomla! 1.5 will still be supporting MySQL 3.23.x. The problem with raising the database minimum requirements with Joomla! at this time has more to do with all the extensions and bridges to the third-party applications.

MySQL Lifecycle policy

Bryan's picture

I thought everyone may have an interest in this PDF found at mysql.com: MySQL Lifecycle Policy. An interesting table on page 2:

MySQL Database Server GA Date ActiveSupport Ends
Extended Support Ends
3.23 2001-01-17 2006-07-31 2006-12-31
4.0 2003-03-15 2006-09-30 2008-12-31
4.1 2004-10-23 2006-12-31 2009-12-31
5.0 2005-12-13 TBD
TBD

Looking at MySQL's download page you'll find that versions 4.0 and 3.23 are not available unless you are willing to download from the archive. Many open source projects are known best for their agility and being cutting edge. Yet, I notice a number of projects are somewhat slow in migrating more quickly to newer versions of MySQL (and PHP as well). If you're trying to support MySQL 3.23 or 4.0 is there a cost to not being able to take advantage of unique features only found in later versions of MySQL?

Now a CMS project not rushing to design only on the latest version of MySQL is not all bad. The fact that projects are willing to provide support for those hosting with older versions of MySQL shows the desire to support the community at large. However, I'm starting to understand why some of the MySQL bloggers and PHP bloggers get frustrated from time to time when users don't migrate quicker to newer versions sooner.

 

Yes, it's very

streaky's picture
Yes, it's very frustrating.. Same goes for PHP.. The whole PHP 5 not being supported thing is totally self-inflicted though.. As long as they output new PHP 4 versions people are going to assume it's unstable, even though that's far from the case.