MySQL AB on Wednesday released into general availability a version of its open-source database with subqueries, faster and more secure client-server communication, tools that ease installation and configuration, and support for international character sets and geographic data.
MySQL Version 4.1, which can be downloaded now here, isn"t the truly competitive database that everybody"s waiting for and that everybody thinks will give commercial databases a run for their money, according to Charlie Garry, an analyst at Meta Group, in Simsbury, Conn. That would be Version 5.0, which will feature stored procedures and triggers and which will take advantage of the 2.6 Linux kernel and its improved scalability and support for things that databases like—asynchronous I/O, for example.