MySQL 5.0 sports a number of new features. The announcement of these features calmed down a number of developers and industry observers who were claiming that MySQL was an inferior product, compared to some competitors who had already implemented these features. Views, stored procedures, triggers, a standard INFORMATION_SCHEMA, and (more recently) a profiling mechanism are now present in the MySQL spectrum.
In June 2005, I attended LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany with other phpMyAdmin developers, where we demoed our software. At this conference, we participated to a joint celebration of PHP's and MySQL's tenth anniversary, along with the respective fathers of these products, Rasmus and Monty. A few weeks before that, at the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, a presentation was titled "PHP 5 + MySQL 5 = A Perfect 10". Indeed, we were aware of what this anniversary meant in terms of products' maturity.
The MySQL 5.0...