The document summarizes several new features in the MariaDB and MySQL query optimizers, including:
1) Subquery optimizations that improved subquery performance from orders of magnitude slower to on par with other databases. These optimizations are available in MariaDB 5.3/5.5 and MySQL 5.6.
2) Batched Key Access, which speeds up large IO-bound joins by accessing keys in batches rather than randomly, improving performance by orders of magnitude.
3) Index Condition Pushdown, which pushes SELECT conditions into indexes to filter records before reading the table, improving performance for IO-bound queries similar to "Using index".