MySQL Community Server 5.5.18 has been released

[hery ramilison]

Dear MySQL users,

MySQL 5.5.18 is a new version of the 5.5 production release of the
world's most popular open source database. MySQL 5.5.18 is recommended
for use on production systems.

MySQL 5.5 includes several high-impact enhancements to improve the
performance and scalability of the MySQL Database, taking advantage of
the latest multi-CPU and multi-core hardware and operating systems. In
addition, with release 5.5, InnoDB is now the default storage engine for
the MySQL Database, delivering ACID transactions, referential integrity
and crash recovery by default.

MySQL 5.5 also provides a number of additional enhancements including:

    - Significantly improved performance on Windows, with various
      Windows specific features and improvements
    - Higher availability, with new semi-synchronous replication and
      Replication Heart Beat
    - Improved usability, with Improved index and table partitioning,
      SIGNAL/RESIGNAL support and enhanced diagnostics, including a new
      Performance Schema monitoring capability.

For a more complete look at what's new in MySQL 5.5, please see the
following resources:

MySQL 5.5 is GA, Interview with Tomas Ulin:
    http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/interviews/thomas-ulin-mysql-55.html

Documentation:
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html

Whitepaper: What's New in MySQL 5.5:
    http://dev.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql-wp-whatsnew-mysql-55.php

If you are running a MySQL production level system, we would like to
direct your attention to MySQL Enterprise Edition, which includes the
most comprehensive set of MySQL production, backup, monitoring,
modeling, development, and administration tools so businesses can
achieve the highest levels of MySQL performance, security and uptime.
    http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/

For information on installing MySQL 5.5.18 on new servers, please see
the MySQL installation documentation at
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/installing.html

For upgrading from previous MySQL releases, please see the important
upgrade considerations at:
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/upgrading.html

MySQL Database 5.5.18 is available in source and binary form for a
number of platforms from our download pages at:
    http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/

Not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point in time, so if you
can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose
another download site.

We welcome and appreciate your feedback, bug reports, bug fixes,
patches, etc.:
    http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Contributing

The following section lists the changes in the MySQL source code since
the previous released version of MySQL 5.5. It may also be viewed
online at:
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/news-5-5-18.html

Enjoy!

Changes in MySQL 5.5.18 (16 November 2011)

Functionality Added or Changed

  * Upgrading from an Advanced GPL RPM package to an Advanced RPM
    package did not work. Now on Linux it is possible to use rpm
    -U to replace any installed MySQL product by any other of the
    same release family. It is not necessary to remove the old
    produce with rpm -e first. (Bug #11886309)

Bugs Fixed

  * Incompatible Change: Replication: The statements in the
    following list are now marked as unsafe for statement-based
    replication. This is due to the fact that each of these
    statements depends on the results of a SELECT statement whose
    order cannot always be determined. When using STATEMENT
    logging mode, a warning is issued in the binary log for any of
    these statements; when using MIXED logging mode, the statement
    is logged using the row-based format.

       + INSERT ... SELECT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE

       + REPLACE ... SELECT

       + CREATE TABLE ... IGNORE SELECT

       + CREATE TABLE ... REPLACE SELECT

       + INSERT IGNORE ... SELECT

       + UPDATE IGNORE
    When upgrading, you should note the use of these statements in
    your applications, keeping in mind that a statement that
    inserts or replaces rows obtained from a SELECT can take up
    many times as much space in the binary log when logged using
    row-based format than when only the statement itself is
    logged. Depending on the number and size of the rows selected
    and inserted (or replaced) by any such statements, the
    difference in size of the binary log after the logging of
    these statements is switched from statement-based to row-based
    can potentially be several orders of magnitude. See Section
    15.1.2.1, "Advantages and Disadvantages of Statement-Based and
    Row-Based Replication." (Bug #11758262, Bug #50439)

  * Replication: A replication master could send damaged events to
    slaves after the binary log disk on the master became full. To
    correct this issue, only complete events are now pushed by the
    master dump thread to the slave I/O thread. In addition, the
    error text that the master sends to the slave when an
    incomplete event is found now states that the incomplete event
    may have been caused by running out of disk space on the
    master, and provides coordinates of the first and the last
    event bytes read. (Bug #11747416, Bug #32228)

  * During the table-opening process, memory was allocated and
    later freed that was needed view loading, even for statements
    that did not use views. These unnecessary allocation and free
    operations are no longer done. (Bug #13116518)

  * mysql_plugin mishandled the --plugin-ini, --mysqld, and
    --my-print-defaults options under some circumstances. (Bug
    #12968815)

  * mysql_plugin returned the wrong error code from failed server
    bootstrap execution. (Bug #12968567)

  * Several improvements were made to the libedit library bundled
    with MySQL distributions, and that is available for all
    platforms that MySQL supports except Windows.

       + Navigation keys did not work for UTF-8 input.

       + Word navigation and delete operations did not work for
         UTF-8 input with Cyrillic characters.

       + Nonlatin characters were corrupted in overwrite mode for
         UTF-8 input.

       + Long queries caused the statement history file to become
         corrupted.

       + The Alt key caused history operations to fail.
    (Bug #12605400, Bug #12613725, Bug #12618092, Bug #12624155,
    Bug #12617651, Bug #12605388)

  * ARCHIVE tables with NULL columns could cause server crashes or
    become corrupt under concurrent load. (Bug #51252, Bug
    #11758979)

  * OPTIMIZE TABLE could corrupt MyISAM tables if myisam_use_mmap
    was enabled. (Bug #49030, Bug #11757032)

  * A query that selected a GROUP_CONCAT() function result could
    return different values depending on whether an ORDER BY of
    the function result was present. (Bug #41090, Bug #11750518)

  * For FEDERATED tables, loss of connection to the remote table
    during some insert operations could cause a server crash. (Bug
    #34660, Bug #11747970)

Hery Ramilison
MySQL/ORACLE Release Engineering Team