Gergely Hodicska continues his series on what's coming up in the next major PHP release with a new post covering the new mysql native driver (mysqlnd) that'll be included.

In the first two parts of this series I wrote about namaspaces and late static binding. In this part I will cover mysqlnd (MySQL native driver for PHP), which is also a really cool feature of PHP 5.3. This a replacement library (not an extension) for libmysql (MySQL Client Library) offering a lot of advantage over it.

He includes some of the reasoning why its a better choice, how it's integrated with the Zend Engine, the memory savings that it will give you and some of the functionality included with it like persistent connections, client-side query caching and statistical data collection functions.