Chapter 11. MySQL 5 Features

With each new major release of MySQL, often-requested features have been added. Many of these features have been present in rival database applications for years, although, to be fair, not supporting them has kept the MySQL software faster and leaner. A number of popular features were added in MySQL 4.0 and 4.1, some of which are discussed in Chapter 10, "Advanced SQL and MySQL."

In this chapter I cover three of the most important features new to MySQL 5. These are stored routines, triggers, and views. Obviously this chapter does assume you are using MySQL 5.0 or greater. As these features are new, it is possible that they will change (hopefully for the better) in subsequent releases of the software, but the following information was accurate at the time of this writing.