Last time I checked, and feel to correct me if I am wrong, MySQL used Row lookups when doing JOINs. There was no support for more efficient join algorithms like

Last time I checked, and feel to correct me if I am wrong, MySQL used Row lookups when doing JOINs. There was no support for more efficient join algorithms like hash-join or merge-join, something which kills performance if you intend to run JOINs on a result/working-set bigger than just a few rows. Are there any improvements in this area, or is it still just the same old, same old?