"Even with all the drama surrounding Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun and critics' concerns about its impact on Oracle's open source database competition, Sun developers are still hard at work on MySQL. One of the fruits of their labors is the recent MySQL 5.5 milestone 2 development release, which introduces many new features to the open source database -- some of which were originally intended for MySQL 6.0.
"MySQL has been talking about the MySQL 6.0 release for nearly two years. The most recent generally available stable release from MySQL is the 5.1 release, which debuted a year ago after both delay and controversy.
"After the 5.1 release, MySQL developers changed the model for rolling out new releases to encourage a rapider and more stable release cycle. Since then, that's culminated in some features earmarked for 6.0 making their appearance early."
