Oracle Announces MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate

The inaugural MySQL Connect conference was held at Oracle (News - Alert) OpenWold 2012, where Oracle announced the availability of the Release Candidate for MySQL 5.6.

MySQL 5.6. now offers increased performance, manageability, reliability, and scalability with Release Candidate (RC).

Vice president of MySQL Engineering at Oracle, Tomas Ulin said of the release, “The evolution of Web applications and Cloud adoption has introduced new performance, scalability and reliability challenges for IT. New features in the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate help address these challenges and deliver a wide array of innovations to the MySQL community.”

The new features Ulin mentioned include better query execution times and diagnostics, which are provided through an enhanced MySQL optimizer, as well as new efficiencies in how result sets are selected, sorted, and returned.

MySQL RC has better transactional throughput, better readability, application availability, and an improved InnoDB storage engine. Specifically, the addition of Index Condition Pushdown and Batch Key Access can improve selected query throughput by up to 280 times.

InoDB has been re-factored for MySQL RC to minimize legacy threading, flushing, purge mutex contentions and bottlenecks, which makes for better concurrency on heavily loaded OLTP systems. The results are significantly improved throughput for read only workloads.

The release also detailed many new features in MySQL replication, including self-healing replication clusters, crash-safe replication, high-performance replication clusters, and time-delayed replication.

With respect to self-healing replication clusters, the addition of Global Transaction identifiers and HA utilities now makes it simpler to automatically detect potential failures, and to recover quickly. Crash-safe replication is more efficient, as it allows for automatic recovery for correct positions in the replication stream in case of a crash, and works to resume replication immediately without administrator intervention.

With MySQL RC, high performance replication clusters are now five times faster, enabling users to maximize the performance and efficiency of replication as they scale-out their workloads, while time-delayed features provide protection against operational errors made on the master.

The updates and new features included in MySQL RC are extensive.

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