More about my ToDo article

Thanks for all the great feedback on my "My personal ToDo list for MySQL" article. I hope that developers read this article and all its comments and try to solve these issues as soon as possible. There are some great new suggestions from Roland Bouman and Giuseppe Maxia which add perfectly to the bugs and feature requests that I wrote about.

There's another idea for a feature request (which I think is also already filed): DATETIME and TIMESTAMP could support milliseconds - that's also something that I found was criticized by people who migrated from other database systems.

Generally, people who try to migrate from other database systems to MySQL might be good suggestors for features or what could be done better - so it's always a good thing to listen to what they have to say.

Even though most of the usual criticisms have become outdated, there are still several points where things could still be done better - often watched from other database systems, or sometimes because features don't work the way that a newbie or somebody who migrates to MySQL would expect to.

But still the very most important thing is to keep MySQL free of major bugs - nothing can do more harm to the reputation of a database system than a bug that destroys data. The harm can hold on much longer (sometimes year) as until the bug is fixed - people and companies migrate away from this product and always consider it unreliable. They might publicly tell about their problems which might make other people sceptical. So they also might choose another product which they think is safer, what might not be true anymore at the time they here about a damage that happened maybe years ago.

Unfortunately, it won't be possible to prevent evil bugs all the times. Where humans work, mistakes happen.

But there's a lot that we - the Community - can do. We can make the developers aware of such bugs and what we think is not yet perfect. This gives them the chance to fix those issues to keep the danger as low as possible that such damage happens too often.