Sun has announced the general availability release of MySQL version 5.1 and Dr. Dobb's contributing editor Eric Bruno spoke with Robin Schumacher, Director of Product Management for MySQL at Sun, about this release and what's in store for MySQL in the future.
What's New?
The MySQL 5.1 release, over two years in making, includes enhancements in four main areas:
- Data warehousing and business intelligence
- High availability
- Manageability
- Performance enhancements. This includes diagnostics and techniques, problem troubleshooting, and assistance with load testing and benchmarking.
Although this release includes multitudes of enhancements, there are three individual features that have been asked for, and used in the preview releases, the most:
Sun decided to implement all five common forms of partitioning: Range-based (such as by date); hash-based (evenly across partitions); key-based (similar to hash, but it uses the primary key); list-based (where you choose the column as the partition key); and composite, where you can choose a combination (i.e. partition by range first, and then by hash).
Another area of enhancement is around tools: MySQL 5.1 offers new utilities to help find problems and issues with MySQL applications. These include the following:
Of course, after MySQL 5.1 comes MySQL 6.0, details of which are available online already (see http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/6.0.html). With this release, there are currently two main areas of focus:
Beyond this, I asked Robin about Sun's grand vision for MySQL in the future. He summed it up quite elegantly, saying that MySQL's focus will be moving away from database management, and more towards data management in the future. After all, the business value is in the data, and that's where Sun believes it should focus MySQL's development efforts. This statement struck me as an excellent strategy, and one that other vendors might risk missing if they concentrate on nothing but features and performance. Sun, it seems, sees the bigger picture with MySQL.
Sure, Sun is doing the expected, such as bundling MySQL with Glassfish and OpenSolaris. However, MySQL is becoming a large part of Sun's strategy for cloud computing. In fact, according to Robin, MySQL is the #1 database in Amazon's cloud offerings. One area that will be more pronounced in MySQL's future is data warehousing, and in data marts.
Moving on from there, Sun has seen that business intelligence is the fifth most common use case for MySQL rollouts. In fact, it was discovered that over 50 percent of customers surveyed couldn't roll out their business intelligence initiative (based on other database engines) because of cost. This is one problem that Sun and MySQL plan to solve for its customers.
Current versions of MySQL haven't handled mulit-terabyte databases well on single servers. Sun is working to resolve this by working with partners such as Infobright and KickFire. The Infobright data engine takes a meta-data approach to solve problems with large data sets, while KickFire builds a SQL chip for query acceleration to handle larger database sizes.
Look at Sun and MySQL to expand more broadly into business intelligence with data warehouse solutions. They plan to do this with more than just market price disruption; they're innovating in ways you'd expect a nimble web 2.0 open-source vendor to.
MySQL: The Future Vision
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence