MySQL 5.0 New Features

This book is for the long-time MySQL user who wants to know "what's new" in version 5. The short answer is "stored procedures, triggers, views, and information schema". The long answer is the MySQL 5.0 New Features series, and this book is the third in that series.

What I'm hoping to do is make this look like a hands-on session where you, as if you're working it out yourself on your keyboard, can walk through the sample problems. To do this, I'll go through each little item, building up slowly. By the end, I'll be showing larger views that do something useful, as well as some things that you might have thought were tough.

Conventions and Styles:

Whenever I want to show actual code, such as something that comes directly from the screen of my mysql client program, I switch to a Courier font, which looks different from the regular text font.

For example:

mysql> DROP VIEW v CASCADE;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

When the example is large and I want to draw attention to a particular line or phrase, I highlight it with a double underline and a small arrow on the right of the page. For example:

mysql> CREATE VIEW v AS
    -> SELECT column1 AS c /* view col name is c */
    -> FROM table1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

Sometimes I will leave out the mysql> and -> prompts, so that you can cut the examples and paste them into your copy of the mysql client program. (If you aren't reading the text of this book in a machine-readable form, try looking for the script on the mysql.com web site.)

All of the examples in this book were tested with the publicly-available alpha version of MySQL 5.0.3 on the SUSE Linux operating system (version 9.1). By the time you read this, the version number will be higher and the available operating systems will include Windows, Sparc, and HP-UX. So I'm confident that you'll be able to run every example on your own computer. But if not, well, as an experienced MySQL user you know that help and support is always available.

MySQL 5.0 New Features