It�s been a long time coming but the wait is nearly over (and well worth it). If you haven�t been following MySQL 5.0 development very closely, the MySQL 5.0 Release Candidate has the following major new features: Views (both read-only and updatable views) Stored Procedures and Stored Functions Triggers Server-side cursors (read-only, non-scrolling) Precision math Larger VARCHARS (up to 64kb) ARCH