As part of MySQL's efforts to work to become a better database system, and to give the end users what they want, they have announced today that the standard version of the MySQL database now includes a high-performance transactional storage engine with crash recovery and other capabilities that will significantly extend MySQL's role in the enterprise database market.

Transactions are one large thing that has been missing from MySQL for a while now, and one of the things that has been keeping it from being used in more business applications and from being a bit more widely accepted than it is.

According to this press release: MySQL now includes the ACID-compliant InnoDB transactional storage engine, which is designed for very high performance and scalability when processing large data volumes and under high concurrency. Consistent with all MySQL offerings, InnoDB is easy to use and highly reliable, having been battle-tested by the Open Source community. InnoDB is now tightly integrated with MySQL and provides many features key to e-commerce and other transaction-based database applications.