MySQL Retrospective – MySQL 3.20

To further advance the MySQL Retrospective in anticipation of the 30th Anniversary, today, let’s discuss the very first version of MySQL that became availble to a wide audient though the popular InfoMagic distribution: MySQL 3.20!

In 1997, InfoMagic incorporated MySQL 3.20 as part of the RedHat Contrib CD-ROM (MySQL 3.20.25). Additionally, version 3.20.13-beta was also made available from sources on Disk 6 (Sunsite pt2).

That’s the same time I replaced Sprite with MySQL for my CGI in Perl 😉

Let’s make a move back in the past (and it was not easy to re-install a 1997 Linux):

Did you know that at that time, MySQL was using the port 3333? It was changed to 3306 starting from MySQL 3.21.2, which was released in October 1998. This change was made to avoid conflicts with other services that might also use port 3333 and to establish a dedicated port for MySQL:

In these early versions, MySQL also supported the go command:

This behavior was changed in MySQL 3.23.23, but can still be enabled:

So with MySQL 3.20 you could use “go”, “\g” (mind the lower case g) and “;” by default:

The vertical output (\G) was added in MySQL 3.22.11.

MySQL 3.20 already had the update log when mysqld was started with the option -l. The update log was the ancestor of the general log.

The update log could be used as a replication method, from the manual we could read:

The “one way replication” using binary logs was released in MySQL 3.23.15.

This is the content of the update log on MySQL 3.20:

What a journey in 30 years!