Oracle is making waves this week in the database world with not one, but two separate pieces of major database development release news.
On the one hand, Oracle issued an open source MySQL 5.6 release candidate. On the other, the company detailed its plans for the commercial Oracle 12c cloud database.
Tomas Ulin, VP of MySQL Engineering at Oracle told InternetNews that his company has been focused on performance for MySQL over the past year. Oracle issued its first MySQL 5.6 preview in July of 2011. Ulin noted that for certain types of queries, there has been a performance gain of as much as 200 percent.
MySQL 5.6 includes sub-query optimizations that improve the query execution speeds. The underlying InnoDB storage engine has also been enhanced for throughput performance.
Ulin noted that overall, Oracle has improved the way that milestone releases are developed for MySQL. He noted that in the early days of MySQL and even at Sun, there were a lot of new features packed into each new release, with not as much testing as might have been required.
Under Oracle’s guidance the number of new features per release has been cut down to be more manageable. While at the same time, there is more effort going into testing and overall quality.
From a release perspective, Ulin noted that users don’t want to upgrade their databases often with big feature releases. He stressed that Oracle has been coming out with a regular stream of maintenance releases though, as the 5.6 release is being developed. The current plan is for major new releases of MySQL every other year. That would place a MySQL 5.6 generally available release for early in 2013.
Oracle 12c
While MySQL is still relatively new to Oracle, Oracle’s namesake database is the core what the company is all about. The new Oracle 12c database will reflect the current direction that Oracle as a company is headed, which is to the cloud.
As opposed to past versions of Oracle database, 12c is being developed with cloud multi-tenancy as a primary architecture of the database.
“Oracle 12c is the software foundation for the Oracle cloud with multi-tenancy built at the right level,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said.
The Oracle Database 12c, is a container database that is able to contain a number of separate pluggable databases that all leverage the same underlying operating system and memory. Oracle Database 12c is set for availability in 2013.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
