The 5.6 branch has finally reached a stable release

Feb 5, 2013 16:41 GMT  ·  By

MySQL, one of the most popular open source databases in the world, has just reached version 5.6.

Unlike regular releases, the new MySQL version brings increased performance, scalability, reliability and manageability.

“MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate received great feedback from the community and helped us to efficiently mature the technology to announce General Availability.”

“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,” said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Engineering.

Highlights of 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; • Better Query Execution Times and diagnostics provided through an enhanced MySQL Optimizer diagnostics is now available; • New efficiencies in how result sets are selected, sorted and returned deliver substantial improvement in query execution times; • Greater performance throughput and application availability with an improved InnoDB storage engine; • 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; • 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; • MySQL 5.6 includes a number of additional enhancements like Geographic Information Systems - Precise Spatial operations, improved IPv6 compliance and optimized server defaults.

A complete list of fixed bugs, updates and new features can be found in the comprehensive official changelog, encapsulated into the archive.

Download MySQL 5.6 right now from Softpedia.