MySQL developers should be able to get their hands on a major update to the open-source database next week when Sun Microsystems hosts its first MySQL conference since acquiring the company earlier this year.

Sun will use the event in Santa Clara, California, to release MySQL 5.1, an upgrade that adds several new features to make the database more suitable for critical applications at large enterprises.

"5.1, though it sounds like an incremental release, has got some pretty major features," said Zack Urlocker, vice president for MySQL products at Sun, in a video postedto InfoWorld's Web site this week. "Probably, we should have called it 6.0, because there's so much stuff in there and we've been working on it for a couple of years."

Among the advances in 5.1 are partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering. They are fairly standard features already offered by rivals IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, but they should help MySQL compete in environments where performance and the ability to scale are critical.

"One thing we're really most proud of is, frankly, we fixed a lot of outstanding bugs in 5.0," Urlocker said. "So 5.1 has not only greater reliability, but a performance increase of 20 percent. It will be more in some cases and less in others, but there's a significant performance boost and scalability enhancements."

MySQL had said it would release 5.1 in the first quarter, which ended March 31, and some developers have been getting impatient for the new release. "I'm a little disappointed that Q1 is almost over and there's still no sign of MySQL 5.1," Andrew Poodle, who runs the MySQL user group in the U.K., said early last month.

Other topics for discussion next week include which transactional engine MySQL developers should focus on as they move forward. Most customers today use InnoDB, but that software was acquired a few years ago by Oracle, and MySQL has been developing an alternative, called Falcon, which is due for release with MySQL 6.0.

At the same time, Michael Widenius, one of the original developers of MySQL, is developing a transactional engine called Maria, an early version of which was released in January.

"The goal of the Maria development team is to make Maria to be the default transactional engine for MySQL by MySQL AB. The Falcon team has the same goal with Falcon engine. Let the best engine win :)" he wrote in a blog post before the Sun acquisition closed.