What is the history of MYSQL?

The evolution of MySQL from a "toy" in the hands of developers to the "world's most popular open-source database" has been marked by product version upgrades and the addition of new features, especially enterprise database features. Now that MySQL 5.0 has been perfected, there are few who would call MySQL a "toy database." MySQL's rich feature set meets the needs of many users, and Oracle's recent actions show how seriously they take MySQL - Oracle has repeatedly said that it is the most popular open source database in the world.

MySQL's product roadmap

Let's take a look at the evolution of MySQL, starting with the more significant versions of the product.

MySQL 4.0

MySQL 4.0 was released in March 2003, and it enabled new MySQL-based applications to gain wider adoption. However, in version 4.0, MySQL did not support stored procedures, triggers, server-side pointers, or views.MySQL 4.0 evolved from version 3.23, and was a significant improvement over version 3.23, which was primarily intended for Web sites; at this time, MySQL was not yet an enterprise-class database.

The following are the major new features of MySQL 4.0:

FULLTEXT INDEXES: Probably the most exciting thing users can look forward to is the FULLTEXT indexes.

FULLTEXT creates an index on a text field, providing a powerful and flexible mechanism for performing Boolean searches on that index. As a general rule of thumb, developers usually have to create indexes and access text data, and FULLTEXT indexes are much better than one might think.

Many solutions are limited to full-word indexes; FULLTEXT indexes have no such limitation, allowing developers to add or split phrases.

ANSI SQL UNION: Supports the ANSI SQL UNION statement, which aggregates query results into a result set.

Multi-table operations: You can perform multi-table UPDATEs and DELETEs.

New statements: Some new non-standard statements familiar to users of other DBMSs have been added (e.g., IDENTITY and TRUNCATE TABLE), as well as new features such as FOUND_ROWS(), which return the number of the record without the LIMIT clause. number of the record that can be returned.

InnoDB storage engine: The InnoDB storage engine, which was a standard feature of servers at the time, became an add-on option in version 4.0. InnoDb is a table type that allows for ACID-compatible transactions instead of the default MyISAM table type, which speeds up general usage but is not very useful for critical operations.

InnoDB tables use a row-level locking feature, which means that an update to a record locks only that record, not the entire table. Locking the entire table is fairly fast when choosing to access a large number of databases (for most Web sites), but slower when the number of inserts and updates approaches the number of options. Criticism of MySQL has long focused on security and consistency issues with MyISAM tables, and ACID-compatible InnoDB tables have come a long way in addressing these issues.

Query caching: MySQL 4.0 can be faster in some cases. This is primarily made possible through query caching, which stores the results of duplicate queries, allowing for speed improvements, although many mature applications implement their own query caching features at some code level. Certain statements have also seen speed improvements.

Embedded Server: MySQL 4.0 comes with an Embedded Server library that allows applications to use MySQL as the underlying database.

latin1_de : MySQL 4.0 supports an additional character set, latin1_de, which ensures that German words are stored correctly.

MyISAM : MyISAM tables in MySQL 4.0 now support symbolic links at the table level, so Windows users can create symbolic links at the table level (this always works for Unix users).

Security model: The security model in MySQL 4.0 has been enhanced to allow administrators to authorize permissions more granularly. New permissions allow users to create temporary tables, lock tables, perform certain replication tasks, view all existing databases, and even connect when the maximum connection limit has been reached - useful for DBAs performing urgent tasks, and even allowing stored procedures to be run (a feature implemented in MySQL 5).DBAs rely on the Enhanced security mode can also limit the number of connections, updates, or queries a user can make per hour.

MySQL 4 is designed to run on top of Novell Netware 6.0. In addition, a number of MySQL server variables can be changed without restarting the server, a useful feature since a restart restores old settings.

MySQL 4.1

With the introduction of MySQL 4.1, for some users, 4.1 has more exciting upgrade possibilities than MySQL 4.0:

MySQL 4.1 supports subqueries.

Many queries can be written more efficiently without subqueries, but there are exceptions. Subqueries are a standard ANSI SQL feature.

Unicode (UTF-8) support allows for more extensive internationalization.

Each column, table or database can be set to a different character set, which is necessary if storing data in multiple languages.

Support for geographic data (OpenGIS).

Enhanced warning delivery. If one is not enough, MySQL 4.1 can send multiple warnings to the client, which is useful for overall data processing.

Some speed improvements. But these speed improvements may be offset by all the extras that MySQL 4.1 takes on.

Despite the fact that the MySQL manual is one of the best manuals released, MySQL 4.1 comes with HELP commands that apply only to this version.

Support for derived tables, e.g.

SELECT table1.field1 FROM table, (SELECT * FROM table2) table3 WHERE table1.field1=table3.field1

Support for multiline queries, which allows running multiple queries and then read the final result.

The various maintenance statements are stored in the binary log, which allows you to simplify maintenance tasks when replicating.

CREATE.... .LIKE allows developers to easily create new tables with the exact structure of existing tables.

Additionally, three notable features of MySQL 4.1 include stable OpenSSL support, more test preparation statements, and more testing of multiple character sets for a table.

MySQL 4.1 is perhaps the first version of MySQL to actually "grow up". With some of the new features and functionality added in 4.1 (e.g., geographic data, subselect statements, derived tables), Oracle started to really focus on MySQL for the first time.

MySQL 5.0

Support for stored procedures. Stored procedures are an ANSI SQL standard most commonly used by developers in other database environments, and it has come too late for MySQL.

Stored procedures supported by MySQL 5.0 have a syntax similar to that of Oracle PL/SQL and T-SQL.

Trigger Procedures (a procedure called a stored procedure when a certain event occurs)

Support for Pointers

True support for the VARCHAR data type solves a long-standing MySQL VARCHAR bug.

Support for RTREE indexes in MyISAM tables will make accessing geographic data easy.

MySQL 5.1

Relative to version 5.0, MySQL 5.1 implements a number of new features:

Online backups (allowing replication slaves to be added without having to shut down the master server).

BIT type, which actually takes up 1 bit instead of 1 character.

Failsafe replication

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