With work under way to build the next version of the MySQL relational database software, Oracle is focusing much of its efforts on improving the software's performance and replication capabilities, according to an Oracle executive overseeing the software's development, reports PC World.
The company's developers are making notable improvements to the core InnoDB storage engine, which should make the database system more responsive. Also, the ability to replicate a database to another location, always useful for backup and disaster recovery, is being enhanced in a number of ways, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle's MySQL vice president of engineering.
Such work is being applauded in the MySQL community.
Oracle released the last version of MySQL, version 5.5, in December. The company has not set a release date for the next version, but last month Oracle released the first preview, or development milestone, version 5.6.
Much of the work now under way is going into making the database faster, Ulin said. The InnoDB storage engine and the optimizer have both been revamped for faster performance. The optimizer, for instance, can save its algorithms for a particular query, should the administrator be pleased with the performance of that query under the optimizer.
The company is undertaking quite a bit of work on MySQL's replication capabilities, which automatically copy databases to secondary locations.
With this release, replication is being sped up though multithreaded support. Multithreaded replication is "an absolutely killer feature," Schwartz said. When data is replicated on a backup server, the software can now spawn multiple threads on the backup server to copy the material in parallel.
Ulin said the company plans to release some more milestone beta releases before the final launch. Also, the company is releasing different preview versions of MySQL, each one implementing a potentially new feature. This approach can ease the job of testing the software before putting it into a production environment, Schwartz said. "If I wanted to test a specific feature, I can test that without worrying about the influence of other features," Schwartz said.
Overall, Schwartz is pleased by the work that Oracle is doing.
Past releases of MySQL tended to have a lot of bugs, which then later had to be patched, he said. Version 5.5, however, which was largely overseen by Oracle, was a clean release and Schwartz expects that version 5.6 will be solid as well.
