New Features In MySQL 6.x

Sometimes we have to add new reserved words along with new features. This can cause irritation. For example, if you have a table named NONE and we make NONE a reserved word, you have to start using backticks or change the name. Beware particularly of these words that might someday become reserved according to one worklog task or another.

ARRAY ASYMMETRIC AUDIT BOOLEAN CIDR CONNECT CUBE CURRENT CURRENT_CATALOG CURRENT_PATH CURRENT_ROLE CYCLE DEFAULT DENSE_RANK EXCEPT FOR GET GLOBAL INET INTERSECT LOCAL MACADDR MERGE NEW NONE OLD OVER PARTITION RANK RESIGNAL ROWNUM ROW_NUMBER ROWS SESSION_USER SIGNAL START SOME SYMMETRIC SYSTEM_USER TRUNC UNKNOWN WINDOW

For an old list that includes reserved words in other DBMSs, check the end of an article I wrote several years ago for DBAzine, SQL Naming Conventions.

Pete Freitag’s SQL Reserved Words Checker could be interesting too.

I’ve been editing a task description in our worklog:
WL#946 TIME/TIMESTAMP/DATETIME with fractional seconds.

This has been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time. But I did think it’s at least time that we should let people know that we think about it. The specific impetus today was a fairly thorough survey of the feature request’s history in a MySQL DBA’s blog posting Once upon a timestamp(milliseconds)….

In my 2008-05-04 blog posting about the roadmap, I included WL#946 in a list with the heading “Let’s not forget that these will fit in somewhere in the 6.x / 7.x period”. There’s a lot to do — I know that’s not clear from reading a typical bugs.mysql.com feature request, but I hope it’s clear from clicking and reading “High Level Architecture” in WL#946.

I’ve been editing a task description in our worklog:
WL#411 Computed virtual columns as MS SQL server has.

The quirky thing about the description, nowadays, is that the columns aren’t necessarily computed, aren’t necessarily virtual, and — if anybody follows the general policy that we should be like the standard — won’t much resemble SQL Server. So it’s not a very good name, eh?

The topical thing about the description is that it differs from a bugs.mysql.com feature request
Bug#46491 Patch: Virtual columns (WL#411). This is another name that could be questioned, since in reality the patch doesn’t look like WL#411. (And before I edited the specification, the resemblance was no better.) Yet it’s perfectly acceptable, as evidenced by the fact that a non-MySQL DBMS accepted it.

What we have, and probably always will have in MySQL, is a question about whether a patch should come in because it’s done (as illustrated by the frequent plaint “why is my patch taking years to get in?”), or whether the specification should come first and then the architecture review, with implementation last. I’ll avoid predicting how this one will come out.