New Features In MySQL 6.x

I suppose it looks odd that many of the “6.x” features I’ve blogged about are now “5.4″ features. Sorry about the surprise. In mitigation I observe that this means some things are now scheduled a bit quicker, and some are a lot better than expected. Sometimes it’s hard to know till tests are in.

The current server 5.4 download is here:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.4.html.
It does not have all the features yet that we have announced as 5.4.

The features in the current 5.4 download are:

* Scalability, that is, it works faster if you add cores or processors.
A lot of the work for this happened outside the MySQL group per se, it’s lovely to have bunches of performance experts from elsewhere in Sun Microsystems, also known as Sun Classic, doing the tweaks for us. Tests show that 5.4 is faster than any variant, whether genuine MySQL or not.

There’s a slideshow, a blog from a Sun Classic employee, a blog from an old-time MySQL employee, and even a reference manual with sections “Changes in MySQL 5.4.0″ and “What Is New in MySQL 5.4″.

Large customers are trying out the beta with (as I understand) happiness. Tomorrow (May 21 2009) there will be a web seminar (”webinar”) on the subject, see http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-343.html.

* DTrace. [sic -- with a capital T!]
The worklog task description “Improved DTrace support in server” (WL#4541) explains that this is about adding instrumentation in the SQL code for routines that aren’t system calls (system calls are handled without us having to add instrumentation). The WL#4541 description is out of date, and so is the manual at the time I’m writing this, so expect the list of instrumentation points to be better than what’s documented.

The features that are already pushed into 6.0, and therefore almost certain to be in 5.4, are:

* Things that make it go faster.
Well, this has been called a “performance release”, so the scalability improvements get coupled with reduced locking / mutex contention (WL#3262 WL#3561 WL#3726 WL#4284) , subquery semijoins and materializations (WL#1110 WL#2980 WL#3751 WL#3985), batch/range joining (WL#2475 WL#2771 WL#4424).

* Things which make programmers’ lives easier.
In this category I put SIGNAL and RESIGNAL (WL#2110 WL#2265), INFORMATION_SCHEMA addition (WL#2822 for thefirst time in public!, and the PARAMETERS view), replication additions, character-set additions (WL#4164 WL#3759) and XML additions (WL#1397).

The features that are not already pushed into 6.0, but which I personally expect have a good chance
of going to 5.4 (we’ll know by the end of June), are:
Performance Schema (WL#2360 WL#4678), Globalization (WL#1349 WL#3764 WL#3997 WL#4642), error messages (WL#751), number-to-string conversions (WL#2649), GIS (WL#1326 WL#2377 ), and partitioning (WL#4444 WL#4571).

There’s also a bit of refactoring work going on in mysys.
And there are bug fixes, including Bug#989.

I decided not to reference worklog tasks that are private, so the above list has a few gaps.

The Date

The goal is that 5.4 will be GA in December 2009. The date is earlier than we thought of for 6.0. I think it’ll probably make some people happy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 7:59 pm and is filed under MySQL 5.4 New Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.