Open Dental Forum

Just out of curiosity, I had an office that I connected my connector on where the server was a bit under-powered which resulted in some queries taking longer than it should have. With MyISAM as the engine, it was also resulting in table locking which was disruptive to the workstations. It seemed the logical thing to do was upgrade to 5.7 and InnoDB. Talking to the IT company that supports the office, I was told that if the office had trouble and called OpenDental Support, they would get the brush off stating that 5.7 isn't supported.

I can understand why 5.7 isn't bundled in the main install, it can take a long time to debug every possibility, but provided someone goes through the process and successfully upgrades it manually, what would be the issue with providing support for the office if at a later time they had trouble?

5.7 Seems like a great option for offices that don't want to go through a hardware upgrade, and I guess I am wondering from a support perspective, what is the difference? Seems like you would miss nothing, and the newer version would provide extra diagnostic and repair tools if needed.

I can understand why 5.7 isn't bundled in the main install, it can take a long time to debug every possibility...

This is the main reason. At OpenDental, we choose to support versions of MySQL that we have tested against our current codebase. This allows us to fix potential problems before they reach customers as well as have a testing environment for problems that slip through.

...I am wondering from a support perspective, what is the difference?

There are a few differences, but the main three are:

• 1. When a customer calls in, our technicians will need to be properly trained on the differences between all of our supported versions. The more we support the more difficult this is. Currently we support 5.5 and 5.6.

• 2. When issues arise, our engineering team will need to be able to quickly test these issues in similar environments to the ones in which the issues occurred. This means we need to have environments for each of the versions we support.

• 3. Solutions to potential issues are more difficult to discern when compounded by the possibility that 3rd party entities (MySQL, Windows, etc...) have changed their code and rendered an implementation that we have potentially used for years as deprecated. These places need to be found and changed to not only work for the new version we are supporting, but also be backwards compatible for the other versions we support.

We are currently in the process of testing MySQL 5.7. After testing has been completed we will most likely implement a plan to support the version.
In the meantime, you are welcome to update your MySQL to version 5.7, our current MySQL C# connector does support that version, but we at OpenDental do not recommend it as of 6/19/2018.