This specifically about new features in the 5.1 release. As much as I like Australia I think it’s retarded to be talking about that at a MySQL conference, though it is funny I suppose.

1. They now support variable sized rows, which reduces memory usage. This equates to more rows per gigabyte.
2. Add/Update Index has been optimized over 5.0. Before it copied the entire table, added the new index and then moved it back over the old table. This all happened over the wire so you can imagine how long that took. This optimization speeds things up about four times.
3. 5.1 now allows you to replicate across clusters. Used for geographical redundancy, split the processing load (why not add more nodes to the cluster?), etc. You have to use the row-based replication to enable this feature.
4. Failover of replication channels is manual.
5. They’re adding support for data on disk in 5.1 and indexes on disk in the future.

This absolutely amazes me. The moral of the story at MySQL UC has been that clustering is a nightmare to set up, maintain and use. However, storing data on disk is a step in the right direction. The solution from Continuent seems to be infinitely more elegant than both clustering and replication.