Monday, October 1, 2012

MySQL Connect 2012

The conference is over.  I had a great time and it was very fun to meet both old and new MySQL users.  It was a packed couple of days and we managed to present quite a lot.  I am energized by all the positive feedback we got on especially MySQL 5.6, Performance Schema, the Parallel MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8, the Connector Enhancements, and the MySQL Utilities. Tomas keynote has the mayor things we announced. Here are some highlights from my team:

1. New release of Connector Python

We were are happy to announce the new MySQL Connector/Python 1.0.7 as Generally Available.  Python is an important language and it feels great that we now fully support this.

2. New release of faster MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8

A lot of users want really fast backup and we have now re-factored MySQL Enterprise Backup into a new multi-threaded architecture.  In certain scenarios where a user is taking compressed backups, internal tests show MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8 to be up to 10 times faster than earlier releases. You can tune it on the number of threads and buffers memory you would like it to use.

3. MySQL Replication 5.6 more powerful than ever

For the MySQL 5.6 release, we have focused on four different areas:
  • Performance (Multi-Threaded Slaves, Binary Log Group Commit, Optimized Row-Based Replication),
  • Failover & Recovery (Global Transaction Identifiers, Replication Failover & Admin Utilities, Crash Safe Slaves & Binlogs)
  • Data Integrity (Replication Event Checksums)
  • Agility (Time Delayed Replication, Remote Binlog Backup, Informational Log Events)
It is great that failover is now so much easier to manage and we have performance boosts for both master and slave.

4. PHP driver enhancements to boost MySQL 5.6

Two PHP mysqlnd driver plugins let you get most out of MySQL 5.6. PECL/mysqlnd_memc alpha substitutes a SQL access with a NoSQL Memcache API access to MySQL transparently.  The second plugin, PECL/mysqlnd_ms 1.4 stable, offers sophisticated failover, load balancing and optional read-write splitting. Global Transaction IDs are used in a creative way to provide eventual consistency, session consistency or strong consistency - no matter what kind of MySQL clustering solution used.  The best: for simple use cases both solutions require no code changes to existing applications.

5. New release of Connector ODBC 5.2

MySQL ODBC 5.2 is set of drivers (Unicode and ANSI) with all functionality of 5.1 series. We also added support for Server Side Prepared Statements and OUT/INOUT parameters.  Earlier, we had 3.51 (pure ANSI) and 5.1 (UNICODE) drivers with 5.1 functionality being a superset of 3.51. Since 5.2 is based on 5.1, 5.2 ANSI is a completely new ANSI driver not comparable to old 3.51.

6. New release of MySQL Utilities

In the latest release of Workbench 5.2.44, we have upgraded the utilities. There is now a Utilities console, i.e. a user-friendly shell to execute utilities with type completion, option name completion, and user defined variables.  At the moment, the best way to get utilities is to download Workbench.  The source code is on Launchpad.