I’ve read through a number of pages detailing the version differences between the different MySQL versions, but none of them have given me a real clear picture as to what is best for the application I am making. I’m in the process of building a CRM which will handle 20,000 customers at launch and built on a LAMP stack. The OS will either be CentOS or FreeBSD.
Right now for test purposes we’ve been using a MySQL 5.0 server for the database, but we are wondering which version we should use for production. If anyone could give some thoughts as to the pros and cons of using 5.0 vs 5.1 vs 5.5 vs 5.6 in the context of a CRM application, it would be most appreciated.
TL;DR 5.5
For a new software rollout, it makes sense to integrate and do final testing with the latest generally available (GA) release of your infrastructure components.
Right now that’s 5.5.20 of the MySQL community server. 5.6.x is considered a development release. It probably doesn’t make sense for you to try to do integration and final testing with such a release, unless it offers a new feature that’s a critical success factor for your new software. (But then you should ask yourself whether it makes sense to make your product dependent on exotic new features in unfinished dbms releases.)
EDIT… @rkosegi has a good point. If you’re going to deploy on an enterprise grade linux server distro like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (rhel) use the version it supports. 5.1 works fine.