Oracle Announces New MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release

Oracle announced a new Development Milestone Release (DMR) for MySQL 5.6, the world’s most popular open source database

Available for download in the MySQL Developer Zone, this MySQL 5.6 DMR delivers new replication features enhancing availability with self-healing recovery, increased performance, and improved manageability.

In addition to the new DMR, Oracle is providing early access to significant features under development for community testing and feedback through http://labs.mysql.com. The features include online operations for ADD index and NoSQL access to InnoDB via the Memcached protocol.

MySQL 5.6 DMR Focuses on Enhanced Availability, Increased Performance and Improved Manageability

The new MySQL 5.6 DMR delivers:

• Enhanced high availability with new replication features, including: Global Transactions Identifiers (GTIDs), enabling replication progress to be tracked through a replication topology, providing a foundation for self-healing recovery, and the ability to deploy more complex replication topologies without administrative overhead. Coupled with the new MySQL replication utilities to provide monitoring with automatic failover and switchover, GTIDs alleviate the need for additional third party High-Availability solutions, protecting web and cloud-based services against both planned and unplanned downtime.
  
• New optimizer features for better throughput of complex queries, such as: Subquery optimizations: included in the optimizer path, allow developers to simplify application code by consolidating multiple queries or result sets into a single unit of work. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP: now part of the optimizer and used as the default for DATETIME columns, eliminates the need for the application to assign this value when blank by default. Faster range based queries: by using ready statistics vs. index based scans, improves the speed of queries with multiple range values. Faster filesort and ORDER BY queries: by selecting the best query execution method at optimization vs. parsing stage. Quick and easy readability: with EXPLAIN output delivered in JSON format.
  
• An improved PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA enables better in-depth optimization of application performance and analysis of the MySQL environment with new query statement summaries and a new host_cache diagnostics table.
  

The following key features are also available through http://labs.mysql.com, for early testing and feedback from the MySQL community:

• Online Operations for ADD Index: improve InnoDB’s availability and performance by enabling true online, non-blocking ADD index operations, and enable faster and simpler schema evolution to support rapidly evolving Web services.
  
• High performance NoSQL access to InnoDB from Memcached: provides the flexibility of using NoSQL techniques to access InnoDB data alongside the existing SQL query model.
  
• Additional performance improvements on modern hardware: increasing InnoDB query performance by better handling frequently updated hot data regions in multi-core CPUs.