5.0.13 Coming to a MySQL installation soon

I've taken a great deal of interest in version 5 of MySQL, mainly because of my background in procedural extensions for other databases. It's been pretty exciting watching the development of version 5 and as somebody who has been keen to exploit the features I've been running as current a version as possible (it's currently at 5.0.12), this has meant at times a bi-weekly installation of the latest version.

One of the biggest requests from people on the stored procedures forum over on the MySQL website has been for information on using prepared statements, I'll gloss over the fact that for 90% of these situations prepared statements are not the way to go. MySQL Stored Procedures did infact support prepared statements for a while but this support was removed in version 5.0.9, this caused all manner of confusion and fist waving by the masses and resulted in a flood of angry forum entires asking where they had gone and why MySQL had pulled the plug....

...the great news is that the latest release notes for MySQL 5.0.13 tell us they are back. For the moment they will only be supported in Stored Procedures and not Functions or Triggers. The bad news is that 5.0.13 hasn't been released yet (at least not at the time of writing) so all you prepared statement fans need to hold on just a little longer.

Now all we need to do is to convince people that a monster stored procedure with 25 parameters to build all their SQL calls dynamically isn't the best use of stored procedures ;)