While much of the focus at Oracle’s OpenWorld event this week is on the company’s namesake proprietary database, Oracle is also making waves with its open source MySQL database too.
Oracle is now out with a Development Milestone Release (DMR) for MySQL 5.7, offering the promise of dramatically improved scalability, among other enhancements.
Tomas Ulin, vice president for MySQL Engineering at Oracle, explained to Database Journal that a DMR is Oracle’s way of releasing new upcoming features on a regular basis.
“Through this effort, we show our commitment to the open source community,” Ulin said.
Ulin stressed that the DMR should not be thought off as a beta release, but rather is something that is better than a beta. Oracle’s ambition with the DMR model is to focus on a few new features and make them GA (general availability) quality.
From a performance perspective, up to 500,000 queries per second can now be done for POINT SELECT queries. Instrumentation for stored procedures has also been improved, so that a database administrator can run an EXPLAIN query in real-time on a running database to get information on running statements in a live database. The EXPLAIN data has also been enhanced to provide enhanced detail into the performance impact of a given query.
Ulin noted that the new losslees semi-synchronous replication system enables enterprises to build truly highly-available systems. The new feature ensures that database transactions are properly committed across both master and slave database nodes.
MySQL Fabric
As part of the MySQL 5.7 release, there are also a few features that are considered to be Labs, or early previews of technology. One such features is mysqlfabric, which enables sharding of data. A Shard is a way of partitioning data across multiple devices or locations.
It’s not yet clear when the MySQL 5.7 release will be considered to be generally available. Ulin said the general goal is to have a new GA release every 24 months.
“Any of these milestone releases are in such a state that within six months we could go GA, but as a general rule 24 months is what we’re aiming for,” Ulin said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Database Journal and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist