Remembering that I did RENAME DATABASE in MySQL 5.1.21 and found it useful I tried it with 5.1.24 (I was playing with 20GB InnoDB database, so dumping is not fastest way) and all my tries finished with "Syntax error".
So RTMF and documentation says
"This statement was added in MySQL 5.1.7 but was found to be dangerous and was removed in MySQL 5.1.23."

For me term 'dangerous' is interesting there , as I'd expect really dangerous is DROP DATABASE (which I hope will not be removed in next release) , and RENAME DATABASE is supposed to be kind of safe - just replaces old name to new one.

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