MySQL is Ready to Play With the Big Boys
- By Matt Stephens
- October 27, 2005
The hot-off-the-presses new release of MySQL, version 5, introduces many important new features which at last make MySQL a viable proposition for enterprise deployments.
There are so many new features that it’s difficult to know exactly where to start. But top of the list for many people must be triggers, views and XA distributed transactions. MySQL can now handle complex transactions across multiple databases in heterogeneous environments.
The new version also supports cursors, which will make application development easier. Navigating large datasets should be much easier to code (and faster, of course).
The new features open up a number of new possibilities; for example this blog shows how to use the new trigger support to create “materialized views” (views of static data) – not actually using the new views feature, but instead using the ability to create a table based on the result of a SELECT statement.
You can get a good feel for the scope of this new release by browsing through the MySQL 5.0 reference manual.
It’s surprising that all of this functionality is packed into a 35MB download, which makes MySQL seem positively sprightly compared with the bloatware that is Oracle (10g Release 2 is a whopping 655MB download!)