Oracle has announced the general availability of MySQL 5.6, the world’s most popular open-source database. 
With increased performance, scalability, reliability and manageability, MySQL 5.6 helps users meet the most demanding Web, cloud and embedded application requirements.
MySQL 5.6 improves developer agility with subquery optimisations, online Data Definition Language (DDL) operations, NoSQL access to InnoDB, new instrumentation in Performance Schema and better condition handling.
In addition, Oracle is hosting the first Virtual Developer Day for MySQL on 12 March 9am US, Pacific Time. The event will include presentations and hands-on labs to educate MySQL users on essential skills and the latest features in MySQL 5.6.
New features and enhancements in MySQL 5.6 are available to MySQL users in the MySQL Community Edition. MySQL 5.6 provides enhanced linear scalability, helping users to leverage modern hardware capabilities.
With this version, users can experience simplified query development and faster execution, better transactional throughput and application availability, flexible NoSQL access, improved replication and enhanced instrumentation.
Highlights of MySQL 5.6 include:
* Better query execution times and diagnostics provided through an enhanced MySQL Optimiser diagnostics.
* Greater performance throughput and application availability with an improved InnoDB storage engine – up to 230% improvement in transactional and read only throughput, enhanced availability, full-text search with InnoDB, and simple, key value lookup. 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, up to five times faster replication through multi-threaded slaves and time-delayed replication.
* 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% overhead.
MySQL 5.6 includes a number of additional enhancements, such as geographic information systems, improved IPv6 compliance and optimised server defaults.
“MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate received great feedback from the community and helped us to efficiently mature the technology to announce General Availability,” says Tomas Ulin, VP of MySQL Engineering.
“The new features and enhancements that MySQL 5.6 delivers further demonstrate Oracle’s investment in driving MySQL innovation, making MySQL a fantastic fit for today’s most demanding Web, cloud and embedded application requirements.”
“With this latest release, Oracle shows its ongoing commitment to the MySQL community,” says Carl Olofson, research VP for Database Management and Data Integration Software at IDC. “These are significant advances in MySQL technology, enabling this open source RDBMS to meet the needs and exceed the expectations of its large and growing body of users.”
“We have experienced tremendous demand for our MySQL cloud services over the past year,” says Brent Juelich, senior director, Managed Services, Savvis.
“Considering the dramatic performance improvements and the new features available in MySQL 5.6, along with the added value of MySQL Enterprise Edition, we fully anticipate even more interest in these offerings in the future.”