New Features Planned for 5.1

New functionality
  • FOREIGN KEY support for all table types, not just InnoDB.

  • Column-level constraints.

  • Fail-safe replication.

  • Online backup with very low performance penalty. The online backup will make it easy to add a new replication slave without taking down the master.

Speed enhancements
  • New text based table definition file format (.frm files) and a table cache for table definitions. This will enable us to do faster queries of table structures and do more efficient foreign key support.

  • Optimize the BIT type to take 1 bit. (BIT now takes 1 byte; it is treated as a synonym for TINYINT.)

Usability enhancements
  • Add options to the client/server protocol to get progress notes for long running commands.

  • Implement RENAME DATABASE. To make this safe for all storage engines, it should work as follows:

    • Create the new database.

    • For every table do a rename of the table to another database, as we do with the RENAME command.

    • Drop the old database.

  • New internal file interface change. This will make all file handling much more general and make it easier to add extensions like RAID.