mySQL has been planing to implement stored procedures and triggers in mySQL 5 for some time now...
But lately, it looks like it's just gonna get better than expected...
Via Simon Willison (great blog!), from chromatic's wrap-up of OSCON day 3:
Brian Aker, fresh on his new job as Senior Architect at MySQL, shocked the world (or, at least, me) when he announced that he'd embedded Perl in MySQL and was using it for stored procedures a couple of years ago. Of course, it did segfault rather often. Fortunately, it's highly mature now. In his talk on "Making MySQL Do More", Brian showed the embedded function API. You can write new functions for MySQL in Perl, Python, PHP, and Java. (Keep asking him about Ruby.) You can link to C libraries; he's used Image Magick and zlib. I'm excited about how easily you can modify queries — SELECT DIFF(foo) ... anyone?
However, if mySQL alone gets that interesting, I wonder what are they going to do with SAP DB ? Weren't they planing on merging both databases somehow?
Anyway, the real question is: how long is it going to take again for hosting companies to offer mySQL 5 as a standard feature on their hosting plans... :?: Most of them still run the ridiculously dumb 3.23 version! Even worse, most customers seem to be happy with it!
Isn't this ironic, on one side databases are becoming a commodity and on the other side, people think being able to INSERT / UPDATE / SELECT (if not just SELECT) is all you need to call something a DBMS...