"5.1, though it sounds like an incremental release, has got some pretty major features," said Zack Urlocker, vice president for MySQL products at Sun, in a video posted to InfoWorld's Web site this week. "Probably, we should have called it 6.0, because there's so much stuff in there and we've been working on it for a couple of years."

Among the advances in 5.1 are partitioning, events scheduling, row-based replication and disk-based clustering. They are fairly standard features already offered by rivals IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, but they should help MySQL compete in environments where performance and the ability to scale are critical.

MySQL 5.1 Upgrade [pcworld.com]

Due this week.
[dev.mysql.com...]