Beyond the questionable claims they make about being the "first", there is one important news item here: MySQL is finally adding transactions, while they denied a need for it for a very long time. I wonder how long it will take for them to realize that stored procedures and subselects are also quite important.
However, I have to commend them on this transaction thing. At least they're making that part happen. It seems the SleepyCat back-end is quite good. The one remaining problem with it is that it performs pessimistic locking, which means that writers block readers. This is not such a great thing for web applications (Postgres and Oracle should still perform better), but it's a heck of an improvement over the "lock the whole table" idea that MySQL had before.
