I’ve heard that the mechanic’s wife always has a car that needs repair or tuneup, the painter’s wife always had walls of peeling paint, you get the picture. What about MySQL DBA’s and their own databases? While I have many versions of MySQL for testing including for example the latest 5.1.44 which I was using for my previous post, what is running on my production server? Let’s see:

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.25-rc |
+-----------+

That’s really old. And yes, to prove my point that we can be our own worst enemy, the previous version before 5.1.25 was 5.1.6. Yes, .6 which worked just fine, and never crashed once for my 20+ websites. While I have downloaded onto my production server several versions ready for upgrade including versions 5.1.30, 5.1,38, and 5.4.1 I’ve never actually gone through the upgrade process.