Clogging up the Web

A number of new features have been added to MySQL 5.0 and I have been trying them out. Among the new features are Stored Procedures, Triggers and Views. These are features that have been around in so-called corporate databases like Oracle and DB2 (and PostgreSQL also) for years. Yesterday I added a trigger to a table such that any update to a row would result in the ‘before’ values of the row being inserted into an archive version of the table with an audit user and audit timestamp being added also. This gives me a full history of all the values that have ever gone into the table. This is useful for auditing, archival and in some cases recovery.

This is what I have been familiar with for a long time with Oracle, but it is nice to have it in everyone’s favourite open source database (PostgreSQL aside).

I will be including that concept and others in a review of MySQL 5.0’s new features in an upcoming article for Linux Magazine. More on that soon.