New Features Planned for the Near Future

New functionality
  • Oracle-like CONNECT BY PRIOR ... to search tree-like (hierarchical) structures.

  • Add all missing SQL-92 and ODBC 3.0 types.

  • Add SUM(DISTINCT).

  • INSERT SQL_CONCURRENT and mysqld --concurrent-insert to do a concurrent insert at the end of a table if the table is read-locked.

  • Allow variables to be updated in UPDATE statements. For example: UPDATE TABLE foo SET @a=a+b,a=@a, b=@a+c.

  • Change when user variables are updated so that one can use them with GROUP BY, as in the following example: SELECT id, @a:=COUNT(*), SUM(sum_col)/@a FROM table_name GROUP BY id.

  • Add an IMAGE option to LOAD DATA INFILE to not update TIMESTAMP and AUTO_INCREMENT fields.

  • Add LOAD DATA INFILE ... UPDATE syntax that works like this:

    • For tables with primary keys, if an input record contains a primary key value, existing rows matching that primary key value are updated from the remainder of the input columns. However, columns corresponding to columns that are missing from the input record are not touched.

    • For tables with primary keys, if an input record does not contain the primary key value or is missing some part of the key, the record is treated as LOAD DATA INFILE ... REPLACE INTO.

  • Make LOAD DATA INFILE understand syntax like:

           LOAD DATA INFILE 'file_name.txt' INTO TABLE tbl_name
                TEXT_FIELDS (text_field1, text_field2, text_field3)
                SET table_field1=CONCAT(text_field1, text_field2),
                    table_field3=23
                IGNORE text_field3
           

    This can be used to skip over extra columns in the text file, or update columns based on expressions of the read data.

  • New functions for working with SET type columns:

    • ADD_TO_SET(value,set)

    • REMOVE_FROM_SET(value,set)

  • If you abort mysql in the middle of a query, you should open another connection and kill the old running query. Alternatively, an attempt should be made to detect this in the server.

  • Add a storage engine interface for table information so that you can use it as a system table. This would be a bit slow if you requested information about all tables, but very flexible. SHOW INFO FROM tbl_name for basic table information should be implemented.

  • Allow SELECT a FROM table_name1 LEFT JOIN table_name2 USING (a); in this case a is assumed to come from the table_name1 table.

  • DELETE and REPLACE options to the UPDATE statement (this will delete rows when one gets a duplicate key error while updating).

  • Change the format of DATETIME to store fractions of seconds.

  • Make it possible to use the new GNU regexp library instead of the current one (the new library should be much faster than the current one).

 
Standards compliance, portability and migration
  • Don't add automatic DEFAULT values to columns. Produce an error for any INSERT statement that is missing a value for a column that has no DEFAULT.

  • Add ANY(), EVERY(), and SOME() group functions. In standard SQL, these work only on boolean columns, but we can extend these to work on any columns or expressions by treating 0 values as FALSE and non-zero values as TRUE.

  • Fix the type of MAX(column) to be the same as the column type:

           mysql> CREATE TABLE t1 (a DATE);
           mysql> INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (NOW());
           mysql> CREATE TABLE t2 SELECT MAX(a) FROM t1;
           mysql> SHOW COLUMNS FROM t2;
           

 
Speed enhancements
  • Don't allow more than a defined number of threads to run MyISAM recovery at the same time.

  • Change INSERT ... SELECT to optionally use concurrent inserts.

  • Add an option to periodically flush key pages for tables with delayed keys if they haven't been used in a while.

  • Allow join on key parts (optimization issue).

  • Add a log file analyzer that can parse out information about which tables are hit most often, how often multiple-table joins are executed, etc. This should help users identify areas of table design that could be optimized to execute much more efficient queries.

 
Internationalization
     
    Usability enhancements
    • Return the original column types when doing SELECT MIN(column) ... GROUP BY.

    • Make it possible to specify long_query_time with a granularity in microseconds.

    • Link the myisampack code into the server so that it can perform PACK or COMPRESS operations.

    • Add a temporary key buffer cache during INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE so that we can gracefully recover if the index file gets full.

    • If you perform an ALTER TABLE on a table that is symlinked to another disk, create temporary tables on that disk.

    • Implement a DATE/DATETIME type that handles time zone information properly, to make dealing with dates in different time zones easier.

    • Fix configure so that one can compile all libraries (like MyISAM) without threads.

    • Allow SQL variables as LIMIT arguments, for example, LIMIT @a,@b.

    • Automatic output from mysql to a web browser.

    • LOCK DATABASES (with various options).

    • Many more variables for SHOW STATUS. Records reads and updates. Selects on a single table and selects with joins. Mean number of tables in select. Number of ORDER BY and GROUP BY queries.

    • mysqladmin copy database new-database; this requires a COPY operation to be added to mysqld.

    • Processlist output should indicate the number of queries/threads.

    • SHOW HOSTS for printing information about the hostname cache.

    • Change table names from empty strings to NULL for calculated columns.

    • Don't use Item_copy_string on numerical values to avoid number->string->number conversion in case of: SELECT COUNT(*)*(id+0) FROM table_name GROUP BY id

    • Change so that ALTER TABLE doesn't abort clients that execute INSERT DELAYED.

    • Fix so that when columns are referenced in an UPDATE clause, they contain the old values from before the update started.

     
    New operating systems
    • Port the MySQL clients to LynxOS.