Status?

Yes. But smart site builders always run a backup of the database before doing anything that has the potential to be harmful.

This is a related question that could go into this issue as well (not trying to hijack it): I'm new to DB Tuner and there's seems to been some development going on since 6.x-1.0-alpha2, is alpha2 still the recommended release to use?

As with any module I think only you can decide. If you are comfortable running code that has not been tested by a variety of people in a variety of situations then feel free to try the dev release. But be prepared to recover from a catastrophe. Otherwise use the current stable release. But since the stable release is alpha you have to be only slightly less careful.

Yeah, I understand that it's up to me and I understand the risks involved, but sometimes there's a well known (amongst the current users) fact that a certain dev version is better than current stable. Hence my question.

Like when the developer of Node Gallery flat out says the the 3.x version is better than the recommended 2.x version. Or when the current stable has well known bugs and everyone recommends the dev version, like when the 6.x-1.9 version of Lightbox2 contain some severe bugs and for a long time the solution was to move to dev where the bugs where fixed.