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About ALTOROS: ALTOROS Systems is headquartered in Tampa, Florida and maintains an office near Boston, Massachusetts and technology development center in Belarus and Russia. ALTOROS specializes on providing value-added e-commerce and web-based software development and offshore software outsourcing services to emerging enterprises helping them successfully plan and implement business initiatives.

MySQL Version 3.23 supports tables of the new MyISAM type and the old ISAM type. You don't have to convert your old tables to use these with Version 3.23. By default, all new tables will be created with type MyISAM (unless you start mysqld with the --default-table-type=isam option). You can change an ISAM table to a MyISAM table with ALTER TABLE table_name TYPE=MyISAM or the Perl script mysql_convert_table_format.

Version 3.22 and 3.21 clients will work without any problems with a Version 3.23 server.

The following list tells what you have to watch out for when upgrading to Version 3.23:

· All tables that use the tis620 character set must be fixed with myisamchk -r or REPAIR TABLE.

· If you do a DROP DATABASE on a symbolic linked database, both the link and the original database are deleted. (This didn't happen in 3.22 because configure didn't detect the readlink system call.)

· OPTIMIZE TABLE now only works for MyISAM tables. For other table types, you can use ALTER TABLE to optimise the table. During OPTIMIZE TABLE the table is now locked from other threads.

· The MySQL client mysql is now by default started with the option --no-named-commands (-g). This option can be disabled with --enable-named-commands (-G). This may cause incompatibility problems in some casesfor example, in SQL scripts that use named commands without a semicolon! Long format commands still work from the first line.

· Date functions that work on parts of dates (like MONTH()) will now return 0 for 0000-00-00 dates. (MySQL 3.22 returned NULL.)

· If you are using the german character sort order, you must repair all your tables with isamchk -r, as we have made some changes in the sort order!

· The default return type of IF will now depend on both arguments and not only the first argument.

· AUTO_INCREMENT will not work with negative numbers. The reason for this is that negative numbers caused problems when wrapping from -1 to 0. AUTO_INCREMENT for MyISAM tables is no handled at a lower level and is much faster than before. For MyISAM tables old numbers are also not reused anymore, even if you delete some rows from the table.

· CASE, DELAYED, ELSE, END, FULLTEXT, INNER, RIGHT, THEN, and WHEN are now reserved words.

· FLOAT(X) is now a true floating-point type and not a value with a fixed number of decimals.

· When declaring DECIMAL(length,dec) the length argument no longer includes a place for the sign or the decimal point.

· A TIME string must now be of one of the following formats: [[[DAYS] [H]H:]MM:]SS[.fraction] or [[[[[H]H]H]H]MM]SS[.fraction].

· LIKE now compares strings using the same character comparison rules as =. If you require the old behaviour, you can compile MySQL with the CXXFLAGS=-DLIKE_CMP_TOUPPER flag.

· REGEXP is now case-insensitive for normal (not binary) strings.

· When you check/repair tables you should use CHECK TABLE or myisamchk for MyISAM tables (.MYI) and isamchk for ISAM (.ISM) tables.

· If you want your mysqldump files to be compatible between MySQL Version 3.22 and Version 3.23, you should not use the --opt or --full option to mysqldump.

· Check all your calls to DATE_FORMAT() to make sure there is a % before each format character. (MySQL Version 3.22 and later already allowed this syntax.)

· mysql_fetch_fields_direct is now a function (it was a macro) and it returns a pointer to a MYSQL_FIELD instead of a MYSQL_FIELD.

· mysql_num_fields() can no longer be used on a MYSQL* object (it's now a function that takes MYSQL_RES* as an argument, so you should use mysql_field_count() instead).

· In MySQL Version 3.22, the output of SELECT DISTINCT ... was almost always sorted. In Version 3.23, you must use GROUP BY or ORDER BY to obtain sorted output.

· SUM() now returns NULL, instead of 0, if there are no matching rows. This is according to ANSI SQL.

· An AND or OR with NULL values will now return NULL instead of 0. This mostly affects queries that use NOT on an AND/OR expression as NOT NULL = NULL. LPAD() and RPAD() will shorten the result string if it's longer than the length argument.