A working "progress bar" for ALTER TABLE. Until MySQL / Drizzle can do this "natively", this is a pretty neat trick

In two words: online operations. In a paragraph: Forget partitioning, row-based replication and events. The big reasons most people are going to salivate over 5.1, and probably start plans to upgrade now, are the online operations: \tonline ALTER TABLE for column rename, column default value change, and adding values to the end of an ENUM/SET\tOnline, table-based logging. No more need to restart your server to enable or change the general or slow query logs. You can have the standard file-based output or choose a table format...which you can query.

The other day, a client mentioned they were getting strange results when running "ALTER TABLE". The episode involved modifying an existing primary key to add an "auto_increment" "primary key": it was "shifting" values. Say what?! As it turns out, it was a very special value getting changed: "zero". Some fiddling revealed the underlying reason. Care to join me?To understand what's going on, follow the example below as we start with an empty database, create a table and insert a few rows:mysql> use test;Database changedmysql> show tables;Empty set (0.00 sec)mysql> create table test_table (id int not null primary key) engine=innodb;Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)mysql> desc test_table;+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |+-------+---------+------+-----+---------+-------+| id | int(11) |  []