MySQL 5.6 introduces a new features that must be used with great care. A MySQL users password can be marked as expired. This way, a DBA can force a user to set or reset his password. The MySQL user must set a (new) password before he is allowed to do anything else. As a consequence, if a users password is expired all standard PHP MySQL API connect calls will fail. Applications stop working unless the application is changed to include a user dialog for setting a new password. To develop such a dialog for resetting an expired password one has to use a new connection flag introduced in PHP 5.4.12-dev. Don’t panic: to get in trouble DBA actions have to be at one level with dropping the MySQL user of a production PHP application…
phpMyAdmin and MySQL Forge, along with the MySQL Build Farm initiative were the main MySQL related benefactors of Google Summer of Code 2008. phpMyAdmin got BLOB Streaming support and a simplified setup script, MySQL Forge got RSS and Atom feeds and the MySQL Build Farm got a test schedule.