Yesterday there was a summit organized by hSenid and the speaker was David Axmark, Co-founder and Vice President of MySQL. He talked about the future versions of MySQL and enhancements about to come.
According to David, MySQL 6.0 beta should be released in February next year and 7.0 should be released by the end of 2009. More attention will be given to Falcon, the new DB engine and into optimizing sub queries. In fact, improved 6.0 version should perform a sub query in 1.8 seconds which now takes 12 minutes.
But as a web developer most intriguing fact is the online backup function that will be available in next version. Now when there’s a need to give the ability to create a online backup option I use an export script from phpMyAdmin. But it’s a messy job. So next version of MySQL should make developer’s life bit easy.