Today, we congratulate our friends at Ubuntu on a great new release, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. As you can see in Mark Shuttleworth’s posting on Google+ from a few weeks back, MySQL has been cooperating closely with the Debian and Ubuntu communities to make sure that MySQL works very well on these platforms, and Ubuntu 14.04 bears the first fruits of those efforts.

Out of the gates, Ubuntu 14.04 comes with MySQL 5.5.35 as default, while 5.6.16 is available in the Ubuntu Universe repository. So whatever your MySQL preference – the mature and battle hardened 5.5 or the newer, richer and better performing 5.6 – Ubuntu 14.04 has what you need.

Going forward, Ubuntu is set to offer a great MySQL experience. Traditionally, Linux distros have tended to stay with a specific version of key components such as MySQL for a long time in order to avoid hitting possible issues introduced in newer versions. However, Ubuntu has recently introduced an approval process that will allow “trusted” software to get updated more often, and MySQL is now on that list of trusted products. Basically, Ubuntu has reviewed our development and QA processes and policies and concluded that upgrading to new versions of MySQL can be assumed to be safe. For Ubuntu users, this means that the distro repos should always have a recent version of MySQL available.

With 14.04 out and about, we really look forward to continuing our fruitful collaboration with the Debian and Ubuntu communities. We want to get MySQL 5.6 into Debian stable soon, and we think it would be natural to roll over to 5.6 as the default MySQL in Ubuntu 14.10. And we have some other good stuff in store for Debian and Ubuntu users pretty soon…