Kicking-off its inaugural [ MySQL Connect ] conference at [ Oracle OpenWorld 2012 ], Oracle today announced the availability of the Release Candidate for [ MySQL 5.6 ], the world's most popular open-source database.
With increased performance, scalability, reliability and manageability, the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate (RC) helps users meet the most demanding Web, Cloud-based and embedded application requirements.
The MySQL 5.6 RC is available for immediate download and community testing at: [ http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ ].

Release Candidate Delivers a Wide Range of Innovations

MySQL 5.6 RC provides enhanced linear scalability, helping users to leverage modern hardware capabilities.
With this Release Candidate, users can experience simplified query development and execution, better transactional throughput and application availability, flexible NoSQL access, improved replication and enhanced instrumentation.
New features and benefits include:
- Better Query Execution Times and Diagnostics provided through an enhanced MySQL Optimizer that includes:
  - Subquery Optimizations: simplify query development by optimizing subqueries prior to execution. New efficiencies in how result sets are selected, sorted and returned deliver substantial improvement in query execution times.
  - The addition of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) and Batch Key Access (BKA) can improve selected query throughput by up to 280x(1).
  - Enhanced Optimizer Diagnostics: with EXPLAIN for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations. EXPLAIN plan output in JSON format delivers more precise optimizer metrics and better readability, and Optimizer Traces enables to track the optimizer decision-making process.
- Better Transactional Throughput and Application Availability with an improved InnoDB storage engine:
  - Better Transactional and Read Only Throughput: InnoDB has been re-factored to minimize legacy threading, flushing, purge mutex contentions and bottlenecks, enabling better concurrency on heavily loaded OLTP systems, and resulting in significantly improved throughput for read only workloads(2).
  - Enhanced Availability: Online DDL operations enable DBAs to add indexes and perform table alterations while the application remains available for updates.
  - Full-Text Search with InnoDB: allows developers to build FULLTEXT indexes on InnoDB tables to represent text-based content and speed up application searches for words and phrases.
  - Simple, Key Value Lookup: flexible NoSQL access to InnoDB provides simple, key-value lookup of InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. Users get the "best of both worlds," combining key-value operations and complex SQL queries in the same database.
- Improved Scale-Out and High Availability: with new features in MySQL replication including:
  - Self-Healing Replication Clusters: the addition of Global Transaction Identifiers and HA Utilities make it simple to automatically detect and recover from failures. Crash-Safe Replication enables the binary log and slaves to automatically recover correct positions in the replication stream in case of a crash, and resume replication without administrator intervention. Checksums maintain data integrity across the cluster by automatically detecting and alerting on errors.
  - High Performance Replication Clusters: up to 5x faster replication through Multi-Threaded Slaves(3), Binlog Group Commit and Optimized Row-Based Replication enable users to maximize the performance and efficiency of replication as they scale-out their workloads across commodity systems.
  - Time-delayed Replication: provides protection against operational errors made on the master, for example accidentally dropping tables.
- Enhanced PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA: new instrumentation enables users to better monitor most resource intensive queries, objects, users and applications. New summaries with aggregated statistics grouped by query, thread, user, host and object are also available. The enhancements allow for easier default configuration with less than five percent overhead.
The MySQL 5.6 RC includes additional enhancements and is a feature complete aggregation of the Development Milestones Releases Oracle previously delivered to the MySQL community.

Supporting Quote

"The evolution of Web applications and Cloud adoption has introduced new performance, scalability and reliability challenges for IT," said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering, Oracle. "New features in the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate help address these challenges and deliver a wide array of innovations to the MySQL community."

Supporting Resources

[ MySQL Connect ] Conference
[ Oracle and MySQL ]
[ MySQL ]
MySQL [ Blog ], [ Twitter ], [ Facebook ]
[ MySQL Community Edition ]
[ MySQL Enterprise Edition ]
[ Oracle OpenWorld 2012 ]

About Oracle
Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ: [ ORCL ]), visit [ www.oracle.com ].

About Oracle OpenWorld
Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco is the most important educational and networking event of the year for Oracle technologists, customers, and partners. This information technology event is dedicated to helping businesses optimize existing systems and understand upcoming technology breakthroughs. The conference, which draws more than 50,000 attendees from over 140 countries, offers more than 2,100 educational sessions, 400 product demos, exhibitions from 450 partners and customers showcasing applications, middleware, database, server and storage systems, industries, management and infrastructure -- all engineered for innovation. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is being held September 30-October 4 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information please visit [ www.oracle.com/openworld ]. Watch Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions and more live on [ YouTube ]. Join the Oracle OpenWorld discussion on [ Twitter ], [ Facebook ] and the [ Oracle OpenWorld Blog ].

Trademarks
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(1) Based on DBT-3 benchmarks, for configuration and testing information see [ http://oysteing.blogspot.com/2011/10/bacthed-key-access-speeds-up-disk-bound.html ]
(2) Based on SysBench OLTP Read, Read/Write workloads. For configuration and testing information see [ https://blogs.oracle.com/mysqlinnodb/entry/innodb_performance_improvements ]
(3) Based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For configuration and testing information, see [ https://blogs.oracle.com/MySQL/entry/benchmarking_mysql_replication_with_multi ]

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Oracle Announces MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate

Oracle Announces MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate