Currently MySQL server 5.4 is still in beta stage and not available in Ubuntu repository. Is it worth to build from source and upgrade to version 5.4? What's the pros and cons of version 5.4 compared to 5.1?
Edit: I read what's new document. It claims performance improvement on multi-core CPU, but mainly for InnoDB tables. I'm curious how much improvement it could make for basic SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE queries, SELECT COUNT(*) queries and AVG(), SUM(), MAX(), MIN() aggregation queries on MyISAM tables.
It takes some time to install the new version and dump/load database to do a benchmark. So I would appreciate you share some of your experience if you have tried the new version.
You should look through all the change docs, such as these: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/mysql-nutshell.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/features-5-4.html