Watch out for Marketing benchmarks
Whenever I see benchmark results I try to understand if it is technical benchmark – made by people seeking the truth or it is done by Marketing department to wash your brains. Watch out. Whenever you treat marketing benchmarks as technical ones, you make make wrong decision. Take a look at MySQL 5.0 Benchmarks Whitepaper and guess which type is this ?
You can also compare it to my MySQL Performance 5.0 vs 4.1 presentation to have some fun.
What can we see ? Out of all MySQL 4.1 vs 5.0 benchmarks which were done only benchmarks which show MySQL 5.0 is faster were selected and bunch of other benchmarks which show 5.0 is actually slower than 4.1 were hidden under the table.
In general any benchmarks I see which show something being absolute winner I smell something fishy. In software development there is no free lunch and your decisions to speed something up often will mean something else becomes slower. There are of course exceptions with optimizing very bad code, but it barely applies to MySQL – Monty is not bad developer at all 
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