Sun Microsystems has released MySQL 5.4, a new version of the popular open source database. MySQL 5.4 includes performance and scalability improvements enabling the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers. MySQL 5.4 also includes new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements, resulting in 90% better response times for certain queries (see www.mysql.com/benchmarks). These performance and scalability gains are transparent and don't require any additional application or SQL coding to take advantage of them.
According to Sun's Karen Tegan Padir, "Without any modifications to your applications, MySQL 5.4 will transparently increase the performance and scalability of your applications, to enable them to scale under more demanding user and data processing loads. MySQL 5.4 is also better suited for scale-up deployments on SMP systems."
MySQL 5.4 features include:
- Scalability improvements -- these fixes allow the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers, more than doubling its previous capability;
- Subquery optimizations -- improves the performance of analytic query operations, with some subqueries now executing in a fraction of the time compared to previous MySQL versions;
- New query algorithms -- utilizes main memory to speed up the execution time of multi-way joins, especially for MySQL Cluster because the number of round-trips between the server and cluster nodes is minimized;
- Improved stored procedures -- enables more robust error management through the implementation of the SIGNAL/RESIGNAL functions, so applications can more easily rely on stored procedures for business logic;
- Improved prepared statements -- Output parameters will now be supported in prepared statements, which increases their functionality;
- Improved Information Schema -- provides more metadata access to parameters and data return types that stored procedures use, which allows much more information to be made available for developers using connectors such as ODBC and JDBC;
- Improved DTrace support -- improves diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities for MySQL on the Solaris Operating System.
MySQL 5.4 will be generally available for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris 10 Operating System, Mac OS X, Free BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM i5/OS and other Linux distributions.
The preview version of MySQL 5.4 is currently available for download at www.mysql.com/5.2 for 64-bit versions of the Linux and Solaris 10 Operating Systems. Based on community feedback, an estimated release date for a general available version will be announced later this year.
