What's new, in a nutshell: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-nutshell.html Release notes: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/news-5-1-x.html (In the video, it's the page entitled "Changes in release 5.1.x"). And yes, very early on (at about 2 minutes in) I talk about my take on Monty's controversial post at http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2008/11/oops-we-did-it-again-mysql-51-released.html The slides can be downloaded as a PDF at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2008_12_New51.pdf or in Open Office presentation format at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2008_12_New51.odp

The unsung heroes of InnoDB are the logfiles. They are what makes InnoDB automatic crash recovery possible.Database administrators of other DBMS may be familiar with the concept of a "redo" log. When data is changed, affected data pages are changed in the innodb_buffer_pool. Then, the change is written to the redo log, which in MySQL is the InnoDB logfile (ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1). The pages are marked as "dirty", and eventually get flushed and written to disk.If MySQL crashes, t