Oracle announced the general availability of the MySQL 5.6 open source database. According to Oracle, with this version, users can experience simplified query development and faster execution, better transactional throughput and application availability, flexible NoSQL access, improved replication and enhanced instrumentation.
Among the key highlights of MySQL 5.6 are better query execution times and diagnostics provided through an enhanced MySQL Optimizer diagnostics. The new release allows simplified query development by optimizing subqueries prior to execution. Additional efficiencies in how result sets are selected, sorted and returned deliver improvement in query execution times, as well. Moreover, Oracle says, the addition of the Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) and Batch Key Access (BKA) can improve selected query throughput by up to 280x.
The new release also enables greater performance throughput and application availability with an improved InnoDB storage engine, says Oracle.
InnoDB has been re-factored to minimize legacy threading, flushing, and purge mutex contentions and bottlenecks, enabling better concurrency on heavily loaded OLTP systems. This is aimed at achieving improved throughput for both transactional and read only workloads.
In support of higher availability, online DDL operations enable DBAs to add indexes and perform table alterations while the application remains available for updates. In addition, full-text search with InnoDB allows developers to build FULLTEXT indexes on InnoDB tables to represent text-based content and speed up application searches for words and phrases.
Moreover, flexible NoSQL access to InnoDB enalbes simple, key-value lookup of InnoDB data via the Memcached API. This is notable, says Oracle, since it allows users to combine key-value operations and complex SQL queries in the same database.
"MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate received great feedback from the community and helped us to efficiently mature the technology to announce general availability,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, in a statement released by Oracle. “The new features and enhancements that MySQL 5.6 delivers further demonstrate Oracle’s investment in driving MySQL innovation, making MySQL a fantastic fit for today’s most demanding web, cloud and embedded application requirements.”
More information is available at www.mysql.com/products/.
MySQL 5.6 is available for immediate download at www.mysql.com/downloads/.