The new Falcon transactional storage engine (see Section 13.7, “The Falcon Storage Engine”).

Support for additional Unicode character sets: utf16, utf32, and 4-byte utf8. These character sets support supplementary Unicode characters; that is, characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).

BACKUP DATABASE and RESTORE statements for backup and restore operations. See Section 6.3, “Using MySQL Backup”.

Improvements in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database, with the addition of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PARAMETERS table, and new columns added to INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES (see Section 18.25, “The INFORMATION_SCHEMA PARAMETERS Table”, and Section 18.14, “The INFORMATION_SCHEMA ROUTINES Table”).

Optimizer enhancements for faster subqueries and joins, including batched index access of table rows for sequences of disjoint ranges by the MyISAM and InnoDB storage engines.

RESET SLAVE no longer changes replication connection parameters; previously, it reset them to the values specified on the command line (see Section 12.6.2.3, “RESET SLAVE Syntax”).

The syntax for the LOCK TABLES statement has been extended to support transactional table locks that do not commit transactions automatically. Following LOCK TABLES ... IN SHARE MODE or LOCK TABLES ... IN EXCLUSIVE MODE, you can access tables not mentioned in the LOCK TABLES statement. You can also issue LOCK TABLES statements that acquire transactional locks many times in succession, adding additional tables to the locked set, and without unlocking any tables that were locked previously. When using LOCK TABLES with IN SHARE MODE or IN EXCLUSIVE MODE, tables are not unlocked until the transaction ends.

Transactional locks acquired with LOCK TABLES are released when the transaction ends, either explicitly with COMMIT or ROLLBACK, or implicitly due to a statement that causes implicit commit or because the connection ends. Section 12.4.3, “Statements That Cause an Implicit Commit”, lists those statements that cause implicit commit.

The behavior of LOCK TABLES remains unchanged for READ or WRITE locks (that is, when not using IN SHARE MODE or IN EXCLUSIVE MODE).

Enhancements to XML functionality, including a new LOAD XML statement (see Section 12.2.7, “LOAD XML Syntax”).

Support for extended comments for tables, columns, and indexes.

The table_type system variable (use storage_engine).

The TYPE table option to specify the storage engine for CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE (use ENGINE).

The SHOW TABLE TYPES SQL statement (use SHOW ENGINES).

The log_bin_trust_routine_creators variable (use log_bin_trust_function_creators).

TIMESTAMP(N): The ability to specify a display width of N (use without N).

The SHOW INNODB STATUS and SHOW MUTEX STATUS SQL statements (use SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS for both of these).

The LOAD TABLE ... FROM MASTER and LOAD DATA FROM MASTER SQL statements.

The SHOW PLUGIN SQL statement (use SHOW PLUGINS).

The BACKUP TABLE and The RESTORE TABLE SQL statements.

The --master-xxx server options to set replication parameters (use the CHANGE MASTER TO statement instead): --master-host, --master-user, --master-password , --master-port, --master-connect-retry, --master-ssl, --master-ssl-ca, --master-ssl-capath, --master-ssl-cert, --master-ssl-cipher, --master-ssl-key.