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MySQL 5.0 release candidate ships

Sep 26, 2005 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — views

MySQL AB is distributing the first release candidate of what it calls “certainly the most important release in MySQL's history.” MySQL 5.0 features many new ANSI SQL-compliant features, rewrites to bring previous functionality into ANSI SQL compliance, and several new storage engines, tools, and extensions.

MySQL is a dual-licensed relational database management system that supports Linux. MySQL AB has partnered with MontaVista on Carrier-grade databases since August of 2004, and MySQL is among the more common open source applications deployed in the embedded Linux devices covered on LinuxDevices.com.

According to a release announcement letter to the open source community from MySQL AB's VP of community relations, Kaj Arnö, new MySQL 5.0 features include:

  • ANSI SQL standard features formerly unknown to MySQL
    • Views (both read-only and updatable views)
    • Stored procedures and stored functions, using the SQL:2003 syntax, which is also used by IBM's DB2
    • Triggers (row-level)
    • Server-side cursors (read-only, non-scrolling)

  • ANSI SQL standard compliance of existing MySQL features, for few “gotcha's” when migrating from other databases
    • Strict Mode: strict data type checking, with errors issued for invalid dates, numbers, and strings as expected
    • INFORMATION_SCHEMA: An ANSI SQL-compliant Data Dictionary for accessing metadata, in parallel to the MySQL specific SHOW commands
    • Precision Math: A new library for fixed-point arithmetic, giving high accuracy for financial and mathematical operations
    • VARCHAR Data Type: The maximum effective length of a VARCHAR column has increased to 65,532 bytes; also, stripping of trailing whitespace no longer occurs

  • New MySQL storage engines, tools and extensions
    • XA Distributed Transactions
    • ARCHIVE Storage Engine for storing large amounts of data without indexes in a very small footprint, intended for historical data that may be needed for future audit compliance (Sarbanes Oxley or otherwise)
    • FEDERATED Storage Engine for accessing data ín tables of remote databases rather than in local tables (only in MAX version)
    • Instance Manager: a tool to start and stop MySQL Server, even remotely

According to Arnö, betas leading up to the 5.0 release have been downloaded more than two million times. A complete list of claimed features can be found here.


 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.



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