D.4.60 Changes in release 3.23.0 (05 Aug 1999: Alpha)

• A new storage engine library (MyISAM) with a lot of new features. See section 7.1 MyISAM Tables.
• You can create in-memory HEAP tables which are extremely fast for lookups.
• Support for big files (63-bit) on OSs that support big files.
• New function LOAD_FILE(filename) to get the contents of a file as a string value.
• New operator <=> which will act as = but will return TRUE if both arguments are NULL. This is useful for comparing changes between tables.
• Added the ODBC 3.0 EXTRACT(interval FROM datetime) function.
• Columns defined as FLOAT(X) are not rounded on storage and may be in scientific notation (1.0 E+10) when retrieved.
• REPLACE is now faster than before.
• Changed LIKE character comparison to behave as =; This means that 'e' LIKE 'é' is now true. (If the line doesn't display correctly, the latter 'e' is a French 'e' with a dot above.)
• SHOW TABLE STATUS returns a lot of information about the tables.
• Added LIKE to the SHOW STATUS command.
• Added Privileges column to SHOW COLUMNS.
• Added Packed and Comment columns to SHOW INDEX.
• Added comments to tables (with CREATE TABLE ... COMMENT "xxx").
• Added UNIQUE, as in CREATE TABLE table_name (col INT not null UNIQUE)
• New create syntax: CREATE TABLE table_name SELECT ...
• New create syntax: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS ...
• Allow creation of CHAR(0) columns.
• DATE_FORMAT() now requires `%' before any format character.
• DELAYED is now a reserved word (sorry about that :( ).
• An example procedure is added: analyse, file: `sql_analyse.c'. This will describe the data in your query. Try the following:

  SELECT ... FROM ...
  WHERE ... PROCEDURE ANALYSE([max elements,[max memory]])
  

  This procedure is extremely useful when you want to check the data in your table!
• BINARY cast to force a string to be compared in case-sensitive fashion.
• Added --skip-show-database option to mysqld.
• Check whether a row has changed in an UPDATE now also works with BLOB/TEXT columns.
• Added the INNER join syntax. NOTE: This made INNER a reserved word!
• Added support for netmasks to the hostname in the MySQL grant tables. You can specify a netmask using the IP/NETMASK syntax.
• If you compare a NOT NULL DATE/DATETIME column with IS NULL, this is changed to a compare against 0 to satisfy some ODBC applications. (By shreeve@uci.edu.)
• NULL IN (...) now returns NULL instead of 0. This will ensure that null_column NOT IN (...) doesn't match NULL values.
• Fix storage of floating-point values in TIME columns.
• Changed parsing of TIME strings to be more strict. Now the fractional second part is detected (and currently skipped). The following formats are supported:
  • [[DAYS] [H]H:]MM:]SS[.fraction]
  • [[[[[H]H]H]H]MM]SS[.fraction]
• Detect (and ignore) fractional second part from DATETIME.
• Added the LOW_PRIORITY attribute to LOAD DATA INFILE.
• The default index name now uses the same case as the column name on which the index name is based.
• Changed default number of connections to 100.
• Use bigger buffers when using LOAD DATA INFILE.
• DECIMAL(x,y) now works according to SQL-99.
• Added aggregate UDF functions. Thanks to Andreas F. Bobak (bobak@relog.ch) for this!
• LAST_INSERT_ID() is now updated for INSERT INTO ... SELECT.
• Some small changes to the join table optimiser to make some joins faster.
• SELECT DISTINCT is much faster; it uses the new UNIQUE functionality in MyISAM. One difference compared to MySQL Version 3.22 is that the output of DISTINCT is no longer sorted.
• All C client API macros are now functions to make shared libraries more reliable. Because of this, you can no longer call mysql_num_fields() on a MYSQL object, you must use mysql_field_count() instead.
• Added use of LIBWRAP; patch by Henning P. Schmiedehausen.
• Don't allow AUTO_INCREMENT for other than numerical columns.
• Using AUTO_INCREMENT will now automatically make the column NOT NULL.
• Show NULL as the default value for AUTO_INCREMENT columns.
• Added SQL_BIG_RESULT; SQL_SMALL_RESULT is now default.
• Added a shared library RPM. This enhancement was contributed by David Fox (dsfox@cogsci.ucsd.edu).
• Added --enable-large-files and --disable-large-files switches to configure. See `configure.in' for some systems where this is automatically turned off because of broken implementations.
• Upgraded readline to 4.0.
• New CREATE TABLE options: PACK_KEYS and CHECKSUM.
• Added --default-table-type option to mysqld.

User Comments

Add your own comment.