Search the MySQL manual:

1.5.1 Features Available in MySQL 4.0

Speed enhancements
  • MySQL 4.0 has a query cache that can give a huge speed boost to applications with repetitive queries. See section 6.9 MySQL Query Cache.
  • Version 4.0 further increases the speed of MySQL Server in a number of areas, such as bulk INSERTs, searching on packed indexes, creation of FULLTEXT indexes, and COUNT(DISTINCT).
Embedded MySQL Server introduced
  • The new Embedded Server library (instead of client/server) can easily be used in standalone and embedded applications. See section 1.5.2 Embedded MySQL Server.
InnoDB storage engine as standard
  • The InnoDB storage engine is now offered as a standard feature of the MySQL server. This means full support for ACID transactions, foreign keys with cascading UPDATE/DELETE, and row-level locking are now standard features. See section 7.5 InnoDB Tables.
New functionality
  • The enhanced FULLTEXT search properties of MySQL Server 4.0 enables FULLTEXT indexing of large text masses with both binary and natural-language searching logic. You can customise minimal word length and define your own stop word lists in any human language, enabling a new set of applications to be built on MySQL Server. See section 6.8 MySQL Full-text Search.
Standards compliance, portability, and migration
  • Features to simplify migration from other database systems to MySQL Server include TRUNCATE TABLE (as in Oracle).
  • Many users will also be happy to learn that MySQL Server now supports the UNION statement, a long-awaited standard SQL feature.
  • MySQL can now run natively on the Novell NetWare 6.0 platform. See section 2.6.8 Novell NetWare Notes.
Internationalisation
  • Our German, Austrian, and Swiss users will note that MySQL now supports a new character set, latin1_de, which ensures that the German sorting order sorts words with umlauts in the same order as do German telephone books.
Usability enhancements
In the process of building features for new users, we have not forgotten requests from our community of loyal users.
  • Most mysqld parameters (startup options) can now be set without taking down the servers. This is a convenient feature for Database Administrators (DBAs). See section 5.5.6 SET Syntax.
  • Multi-table DELETE and UPDATE statements have been added..
  • Support has been added for symbolic linking to MyISAM at the table level (and not just the database level as before) and for enabling symlink handling by default on Windows.
  • SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and FOUND_ROWS() are new functions that make it possible to find out the number of rows a SELECT query that includes a LIMIT clause would have returned without that clause.

The news section of this manual includes a more in-depth list of features. See section D.3 Changes in release 4.0.x (Production).

User Comments

Add your own comment.