Updated: March 18th, 2008
Today Robin Schumacher, MySQL's Director of Product Management, announced that the mysql Falcon storage engine has moved into a beta release stage. Falcon, a new transactional storage engine introduced in mysql 6 (aka 5.2), has been in alpha for years. Other popular storage engines include MyISAM, InnoDB, which Falcon is supposed to challenge (successfully? :-/), and the upcoming Maria.
Falcon features:
- ACID transaction compliant
 - Crash recovery
 - User-defined tablespaces
 - High-speed data caches
 - Advanced B-Tree indexes
 - Performance/diagnostic monitoring tables
 - Simplified configuration
 
You can download mysql 6 with Falcon here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/6.0.html.
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.
