Since the time that I’ve been using MySQL I have filed quite a few bug reports. Some of these have been fixed and many of the bug reports are actually new feature requests. While working with MySQL Enterprise Monitor I’ve probably filed more feature requests than bug reports.
That’s fine of course and my opinion of what is needed in MySQL or Merlin is one thing, yours or the MySQL developers is something else. We all have our own needs and find things missing which would solve our specific problems.
If I have ten feature requests open and only one could be added to the software I’d also like to be able to say: this feature is the most important one for me.
However, it seems to me that there is no easy way in the mysql bug tracker at the moment to group together different types of new feature requests into groups of related features and then see the different types of requested features. I imagine many feature requests may be quite similar, but as I do not have a lot of time to look at all bugs it is easy to lose track of the things that people are asking for. It’s also likely that others who might be interested in my feature request are not aware of the request or able to say “I’d like this too”.
Having a clearer list of requested new features, especially if you have a clearer idea of how many people are interested in these new features (whether paying customers or not) would surely be a good way of guiding the product’s development in the way which would be useful to a wider audience. Is there any way this can be done with MySQL, and how is this done with other products which also are complex and have “insufficient resources” to be able to satisfy everyone’s wish?
Currently I do not feel that I can see where MySQL is going or work out if features that I need might actually be implemented in a reasonable time span (or at all) and that is rather frustrating. Some of the “Enterprise” type features that I think are important such as better partition management (variables such as innodb_file_per_table really suck, but the alternatives of X ibdata files which you can’t manage properly are even worse), better replication (taking out the replication process and putting into a separate daemon which would allow you to do N:1 replication, currently impossible in the current MySQL implementation but actually very useful if you want to have multiple sets of replicated databases each handling their own dataset, but with one or more central servers which see the whole combined dataset) are just larger more complex examples but many simpler changes are also important and some I get told will happen after MySQL 7. For me that’s never never land….
So is there a way that this can all be done more transparentlly?
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