April 10th, 2003

MySQL 4.1.0, a new version of the popular Open Source Database, has been released. It is now available in source and binary form for a number of platforms from our download pages at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/ and mirror sites.

Note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point in time - if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.

This is the first Alpha development release of the 4.1 tree, adding many new features (see below). As this code is currently labeled "Alpha", we do not recommend that this version be used in production environments yet!

However, we encourage you to test and evaluate it and, more importantly, report any bugs or observations to our bug tracking database at http://bugs.mysql.com. Please note, that for us to resolve a bug report, a reproducible test is required. See "How to report a bug" at http://bugs.mysql.com/how-to-report.php for more details before filing a bug report. We appreciate your support!

Some new features include:

• Subqueries:
  SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE t1.a=(SELECT t2.b FROM t2);
  SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE (1,2,3) IN (SELECT a,b,c FROM t2);


• Derived tables:
  SELECT t1.a FROM t1, (SELECT * FROM t2) t3 WHERE t1.a=t3.a;


• INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE... syntax. This allows you to UPDATE an existing row if the insert would cause a duplicate value in a PRIMARY or UNIQUE key. (REPLACE allows you to overwrite an existing row, which is something entirely different). See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/INSERT.html for more info.


• A newly designed GROUP_CONCAT() aggregate function. See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Group_by_functions.html for more info.


• Extensive Unicode (UTF8) support.


• Character sets can be defined per column, table and database.


• BTREE index on HEAP tables.


• Support for OpenGIS (Geographical data). See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/GIS_spatial_extensions_in_MySQL.html for more info.


• SHOW WARNINGS shows warnings for the last command. See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/SHOW_WARNINGS.html for more info.


• Faster binary protocol with prepared statements and parameter binding. See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/C_API_Prepared_statements.html for more info.


• Multi-line queries: You can now issue several queries at once and then read the results in one go. Note C API multiple queries. See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/C_API_multiple_queries.html for more info.


• Create Table: CREATE [TEMPORARY] TABLE [IF NOT EXISTS] table LIKE table


• Server based HELP command that can be used in the mysql command line client (and other clients) to get help for SQL commands.

For a more detailed list of changes in MySQL 4.1.0, please also see http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/News-4.1.0.html and http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/MySQL_4.1_In_A_Nutshell.html.