While the MySQL 5.1 feature list looks quite tasty to me, the MySQL 5 feature list has not really won me over. Aside from the fact that most new MYSQL 5 features have been quite bug plagued (though this is now mostly resolved side from the performance issues with VIEW's and INFORMATION_SCHEMA). So Arjen is doing some courses on MySQL 5 features, which got me thinking which are the features I regularly use? Uhm .. I think there is only one, which are VIEW's. Actually I always end up using them for the same thing: Computing a status field that changes given the CURRENT_DATE. I tend to try and avoid cron jobs for these tasks whenever I can. Of course it would be more performant to update the status once, but replying on the status update cron job to actually work right at the expected time is tricky. Maybe with the event scheduler in 5.1 I will consider changing this VIEW use case.