Robin Schumacher

You would think I’d get very use to seeing the power of the Web and open source in action working at MySQL. However, recently I got another dose of “wow” on the power and speed of both.

As a project for a Master’s program I’m in, I created a new web site and organization. I was amazed at how quickly I got everything out on the Web. I’m not a “host it yourself” kind of guy, so I picked a highly rated web hosting outfit and after filling out a single form and giving them an obscenely small amount of money, my domain was registered and I upload my entire site in under 10 minutes.

As part of this same project, I needed to create Podcasts, so I downloaded Audacity, which is a FOSS audio mixing product. Before long, I had professionally sounding Podcasts which surprised even my friends in terms of how good they sound (all I used was Audacity and a $40 mic headset). One friend commented that a family member had recently gotten into broadcasting and spent over $5,000 on audio mixing software and mics, and his stuff sounded the same as mine. Reminds me of how MySQL packs a punch in the face of much higher-priced DBMS’s…

Just a quick note to let everyone know that the new MySQL 6.0 alpha is now available for download. At last week’s MySQL User’s Conference, all the Falcon sessions were packed so there is definitely a lot of interest about our new transactional storage engine. Do note the version number change - previous alpha’s were labeled 5.2, but we’ve now made the decision to move to 6.0 for the Falcon release of the MySQL Server.

The latest alpha contains bug fixes, performance improvements, and the first cut of the new diagnostic/performance views (contained inside the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database) that helps DBA’s get insight into how well Falcon is performing and the resources it’s using:

mysql> show tables like 'FAL%';
+-------------------------------------+
| Tables_in_information_schema (FAL%) |
+-------------------------------------+
| FALCON_RECORD_CACHE_SUMMARY         |
| FALCON_SYSTEM_MEMORY_DETAIL         |
| FALCON_SYSTEM_MEMORY_SUMMARY        |
| FALCON_SYNCOBJECTS                  |
| FALCON_RECORD_CACHE_DETAIL          |
| FALCON_TRANSACTION_SUMMARY          |
| FALCON_DATABASE_IO                  |
| FALCON_TRANSACTIONS                 |
| FALCON_SERIAL_LOG                   |
+-------------------------------------+
9 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Download the new 6.0 alpha today and let me know what you think about the Falcon engine and what other performance metrics you’d like to see exposed.