On April 9th MySQL AB announced the alpha release of version 4.1 of the leading open source database.

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;
• support for defining the character set for any column, table, and database
• extensive Unicode support
• support for OpenGIS (geographical) data

If you’re not ready to brave the alpha, check out 4.0 which is now production, at last UNION !:

• Features to simplify migration from other databases to MySQL, such as the “Truncate Table,” “Union” and “Cast” SQL syntax additions
• The transactional engine, InnoDB, in the standard 4.0 binaries, adding transactions, row-level locking, and foreign key integrity
• A query cache, offering increased performance for many applications with repetitive queries
• Full-text indexing, searching on packed indexes, bulk inserts and other new optimizations for faster query execution