Transaction support is the biggest change in the new release. Other open source databases, such as PostgreSQL and Borland's InterBase, have long offered transaction support and provide more SQL language support. Using MySQL's new Berkeley Database table type, we built a transaction safe table that let us start a transaction, make changes to data, and then roll back changes to undo our alterations. We found that transaction support did not work on two test servers running Red Hat Linux 7.0, although it did work on a Red Hat Linux 6.2 server. MySQL uses page-level locking, which can cause performance problems when database hot spots occur.
Hot spots arise when many inserts and deletions are applied in one particular area of a database.
MySQL still lags behind PostgreSQL and InterBase in SQL language support, because it does not support such key SQL features as foreign keys, views and sub-selects, or selects in an SQL 'Where' clause. All of these are useful, and without them it can be difficult to run reports or perform data analysis. MySQL also does not support a stored procedure language. Version 3.23's new support for full text indexing and memory-only tables are useful for finding and manipulating data. The new Fulltext index type and Match keyword let us search through text columns to find the top-ranked rows for a set of keywords.