I’ve been editing a task description in our worklog:
WL#946 TIME/TIMESTAMP/DATETIME with fractional seconds.

This has been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time. But I did think it’s at least time that we should let people know that we think about it. The specific impetus today was a fairly thorough survey of the feature request’s history in a MySQL DBA’s blog posting Once upon a timestamp(milliseconds)….

In my 2008-05-04 blog posting about the roadmap, I included WL#946 in a list with the heading “Let’s not forget that these will fit in somewhere in the 6.x / 7.x period”. There’s a lot to do — I know that’s not clear …

I’ve been editing a task description in our worklog:
WL#706 Add EXPLAIN support for other statements (UPDATE/DELETE).

Currently MySQL supports EXPLAIN SELECT but there have been requests for EXPLAIN UPDATE, EXPLAIN DELETE, and so on. In fact it’s my impression that the proposition in WL#706 (transform the statement to a SELECT and then say EXPLAIN SELECT) is not what people want. But that’s okay, while a worklog is an early stage we allow simple ’solutions’ that might disappear later.

I thought I was clear in earlier blog postings about Performance Schema, but I’ll have to write more firmly.

1. Performance Schema source code is available:
https://code.launchpad.net/~marc.alff/mysql-server/mysql-6.0-perfschema

2. Performance Schema has been in development for less than one year.

3. All Performance Schema worklog task descriptions are public on forge.mysql.com.

Developments seem to be accelerating, here’s anecdotal evidence.

Foreign Keys
The Foreign Keys (all engines) worklog task passed another milestone last week: now MySQL is doing referential constraint checks at end of statement when the standard so prescribes, rather than row-by-row. This means that the all-engines functionality is now slightly greater than what’s in MySQL’s current InnoDB-only foreign-key handling.

The closing of Bug#989
“The wheels of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.” Our Bordeaux-area Maria expert Guilhem Bichot reported Bug#989 “If DROP TABLE while there’s an active transaction, wrong binlog order” in August 2003 and some unkind soul even mentioned it on the wikipedia article about MySQL. The mention is gone now. And so …

MySQL 6.x Roadmap in Development
By Peter Gulutzan

MySQL’s marketing folks know what goes on, but they emphasize the marketable. I’ll re-spin what they say about MySQL Version 6 and 7, emphasizing what we’re developing now.

The slide show from the April 2008 User Conference lists the coming features thus:
”
[ MySQL 6.0 ]
Falcon Engine (Transactional engine)
New Backup (version 1.0) (Cross engine, non blocking)
Online add column (Cluster only)
Replication conflict detection (Cluster only)
Optimizer enhancements (Faster subqueries)
Better performance info (Diagnostics and more)
Alpha available now (with Falcon beta)
GA scheduled for Q4/2008
[ MySQL 6.x ]
Foreign keys (all storage engines)
Better prepared statements (prepare any SQL statement)
Better server-side cursors (Faster/less memory)
Replication …