New MySQL Features

Versions 4 and 4.1 of MySQL have been significant upgrades, adding many new features to the database application. Although you do not need to use all of these new features with every Web application you develop, in the right circumstances they’ll make a world of difference. I’ll discuss and demonstrate the most important additions here.

First up are transactions, which require the InnoDB storage engine (see Chapter 5, “Advanced SQL and MySQL,” for information on the different storage engines). If you are using version 4.0 or later, you should have the InnoDB type available to you.

After that, I’ll go over prepared statements. These are available as of MySQL 4.1, and you can run prepared statements through PHP using the Improved ...

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