Can someone who knows this stuff give a bit of an overview on the significance of this release?
I read the NoSQL stuff as Oracle/MySQL trying to compete (at least in terms of marketing-speak) with the wave of competition that's arrived in the DB market. Is there any meat to it?
Cluster has "sql nodes" (that you query against) and "data nodes" that house the actual data, which "sql nodes" talk to to actually process the query.
Cluster can now tell the data nodes to only return necessary subsets of data back to the "sql nodes" when doing a JOIN, instead of pulling down more information (and filtering on the sql node side) when answering complex JOIN queries.
You can read more about this at "push down" feature at http://www.clusterdb.com/mysql-cluster/trying-out-mysql-push...
Note that the linked article also outlines more about this feature under the heading "70x Higher JOIN Performance with Adaptive Query Localization".
This release adds an additional memcache api layer which sits on top of NDB API, so that you can more easily program against it.