MySQL 5.0 Features - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management - page 259

MySQL 5.0 Features
MySQL 5.0 sports a number of new features. The announcement of these features
calmed down a number of developers and industry observers who were claiming
that MySQL was an inferior product, compared to some competitors who had
already implemented these features. Views, stored procedures, triggers, a standard
INFORMATION_SCHEMA , and (more recently) a profiling mechanism are now present in
the MySQL spectrum.
Observations on the History of MySQL 5.0
In June 2005, I attended LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany with other phpMyAdmin
developers, where we demoed our software. At this conference, we participated to a
joint celebration of PHP's and MySQL's tenth anniversary, along with the respective
fathers of these products, Rasmus and Monty. A few weeks before that, at the
MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, a presentation was titled "PHP 5 + MySQL
5 = A Perfect 10". Indeed, we were aware of what this anniversary meant in terms of
products' maturity.
The MySQL 5.0.x history spans quite a long time. Indeed, the 5.0.0 alpha version
became available in December 2003, and started the round of new features with basic
support for stored procedures. In the next version (5.0.1), views support was born.
Information_schema appeared in version 5.0.2. Later, version 5.0.3 was labeled
Beta and released in March 2005, while 5.0.13 was considered a release candidate in
September 2005. A production release, 5.0.15, was made available in October 2005.
You should worry and talk to your system administrator or ISP if they
want you to use a pre-5.0.15 version of the 5.0.x family, as this is not
considered production-ready.
Another new feature, profiling, was surprisingly added in version 5.0.37, well after
the 5.0.x family was branded as production-ready.