Jonas in the Cluster team reported on his work on executing
  joins in the NDB kernel for MySQL Cluster here.
  
  This is a very interesting work we have in progress at
  MySQL.
  We are working on an extension of the Storage Engine API
  where the MySQL Server will present an Abstract Query Tree
  to the Storage Engine. The Storage Engine can then decide
  to
  execute the query on his own or decide that the MySQL
  Server
  should execute it in the classic manner. In the first
  prototype
  the optimisation will be done as usual and only after the
  optimisation phase will we present the join to the storage
  engine. However the specification also covers work on
  integrating this with the optimiser and also enabling the
  possibility for the storage engine to execute parts of the
  query and not the entire one. The specification …
  I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with
  Jonas
  Oreland today (he also blogged about it on his blog at
  http://jonasoreland.blogspot.com).
  
  There is a lot of interesting features coming up in MySQL
  Cluster
  version 6.4. Online Add Node is one of those, which can be
  done
  without any downtime and even with almost no additional
  memory
  needed other than the memory in the new machines added into
  the
  cluster. This is a feature I started thinking almost 10 years
  ago
  so it's nice to see the fourth version of the solution actually
  be
  implemented and it's a really neat solution to the problem,
  definitely fitting the word innovative.
  
  The next interesting feature is to use a more efficient
  protocol
  for handling large operations towards the data nodes. This makes
  it
  use less bits …
  The newest development in the partitioning code
  is WL#4571.
  
  This new feature makes it possible to tie a
  partition using MyISAM to a specific cache index.
  The syntax for how to do is available in the
  above worklog entry.
  
  We found this feature to be useful for enabling
  higher performance of parallel ALTER TABLE
  (WL#2550). When adding
  a primary key to a MyISAM table the key cache in
  MyISAM limited scalability of Parallel ALTER TABLE
  severely, so adding several key caches, essentially
  one per partition we can ensure that the ALTER TABLE
  can be fully parallelised (all other ALTER TABLE
  on MyISAM already scales perfectly).
  
  We also have some ideas on how to solve the base
 …