Sun Microsystems late last week released version 5.1 of the open source MySQL database software, but the software’s founder simultaneously warned of a number of bugs present in the included new features that still needed to be fixed.

Michael “Monty” Widenius, the founder of MySQL stated in a blog post that most of the issues identified were serious or crashing bugs. Not all problems are related to the new features; there are a number of older, known bugs that are still present in this release.

The new features introduced have been ranked as “beta” quality.

There are a number of issues associated with the partitioning feature, such as the difficulty to restore a partitioned table if it crashes, and the chance of losing all data in the event of a server crashing during the rename table feature of a partitioned table. Widenius highlighted that the feature was inefficient, particularly if there were many partitions in a database.

Row-based replication has not been enabled by default, because of a number of problems. Users are advised to test the latest MySQL version before deploying it to production systems.