Oracle Tunes MySQL 5.6 For The Cloud

Chris Preimesberger,

With the first developer release of MySQL 5.6, Oracle is fine-tuning the database for cloud systems

It seems as if all IT software and hardware development is positioned toward – or at least trying to be in the same picture with – cloud computing these days.

MySQL is the latest product to get onto the cloud bandwagon. On Day 1 of the Oracle Users Group’s Collaborate 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida, Oracle’s MySQL group on 11 April announced the first development release of MySQL 5.6, which the company says is fine-tuned to deliver better performance and scalability for applications running in cloud systems.

The company credits this largely to an improved InnoDB storage engine and enhanced replication capabilities. Of course, any improvements to MySQL can enhance many types of enterprise system deployments.

New features

Oracle invited the MySQL community to test significant new features, such as NoSQL access to InnoDB via the Memcached protocol, at this site.

New features in MySQL 5.6, according to Oracle:

  • An improved optimiser enabling better query performance.More partitioning options providing faster access to relevant data. 
  • An enhanced PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, facilitating better performance monitoring and tuning.
  • An improved InnoDB storage engine that brings Persistent Optimiser Statistics; multi-threaded purge, making purge operations more efficient; and Configurable Data Dictionary cache, enabling DBAs to more efficiently deploy systems with a large number of tables.
  • Enhanced replication, which provides new crash-safe slaves and replication checksums that improve data integrity and detect errors; optimised row-based replication improving replication performance and reducing system resource consumption; time delayed replication, providing DBAs more flexibility; and Remote Binary Log Backup, enabling DBAs to create real-time backups from the binary log.

“With this first MySQL 5.6 development milestone release, we are offering early access to new stable features for testing,” said Tomas Ulin, Oracle’s MySQL vice president of engineering.

The MySQL 5.6 development milestone release can be downloaded here.