DBA and Developer Guide to

Whats new in MySQL 5.6

A MySQL White Paper

February, 2013

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 3
Better Performance and Scalability: Improved InnoDB Storage Engine ............................... 3
Better Query Execution Times and Diagnostics: Improved Optimizer.................................. 7
Better Application Availability: Online DDL/Schema Changes .............................................. 8
Better Developer Agility: NoSQL Access to InnoDB .............................................................. 9
Better Developer Agility: Extended InnoDB Use Cases ....................................................... 10
Improved Replication and High Availability .......................................................................... 11
Improved Performance Schema............................................................................................. 13
Improved Security ................................................................................................................... 14
Other Important Enhancements ............................................................................................. 14
MySQL 5.6: Production Ready Software and Support ......................................................... 16
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 17
Learn More .............................................................................................................................. 18

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Page 2

Introduction
MySQL is the most trusted and depended-on open source database platform in use today. As such, 9
out of the top 10 most popular and highly-trafficked websites in the world rely on MySQL primarily due to
its ubiquity across heterogeneous platforms and application stacks and for its well-known performance,
reliability and ease of use. MySQL 5.6 builds on this momentum by delivering across the board
improvements designed to enable innovative DBAs and Developers to create and deploy the next
generation of web, embedded and Cloud/SaaS/DaaS applications on the latest generation of
development frameworks and hardware platforms.
At a glance, MySQL 5.6 is simply a better MySQL with improvements that enhance every functional area
of the database kernel, including:

Better Performance and Scalability

Improved InnoDB storage engine for better transactional throughput
Improved Optimizer for better query execution times and diagnostics
Better Application Availability with Online DDL/Schema changes
Better Developer Agility with NoSQL Access with Memcached API to InnoDB
Improved Replication for high performance, self-healing distributed deployments
Improved Performance Schema for better instrumentation
Improved Security for worry-free application deployments
And other Important Enhancements

This paper serves as a DBA and Developer guide to MySQL 5.6 as it highlights the key new features in
each of these areas, many with practical use case examples. To conclude, there is a summary of how
MySQL 5.6 can be implemented using best practices comprising production-ready support and services
of the MySQL Enterprise Edition offering.

Better Performance and Scalability: Improved InnoDB Storage Engine

From an operational standpoint MySQL 5.6 provides better sustained linear performance and scale on
systems supporting multi-processors and high CPU thread concurrency. Key to this are improvements to
Oracles InnoDB storage engine efficiency and concurrency that remove legacy thread contention and
mutex locking within the InnoDB kernel. These improvements enable MySQL to fully exploit the
advanced multi-threaded processing power of todays x86-based commodity-off-the-shelf hardware.
Internal benchmarks for SysBench Read/Write and Read Only workloads show a marked improvement in
sustained scale over the most current version of MySQL 5.5. The following shows that MySQL 5.6
provides up and to the right linear read/write transactions per second (TPS) scale on systems that
support upwards of 60 concurrent CPU threads.

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Page 3

Figure 1: SysBench Read/Write TPS Sustained Linear Scalability 60 CPU threads

Read only TPS workload sustained scale is also improved as demonstrated here:

Figure 2: SysBench Read Only TPS Sustained Linear Scalability 60 CPU threads

Better Transactional Throughput

MySQL 5.6 also improves InnoDB for better performance and scalability on highly concurrent,
transactional and read intensive workloads. In these cases performance gains are best measured by
how an application performs and scales as concurrent user workloads grow. In support of these use
cases, InnoDB has a new re-factored architecture that minimizes mutex contentions and bottlenecks and
provides a more consistent access path to underlying data. Improvements include:

Kernel mutex split to remove a single point of contention

New thread for flushing operations

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Page 4

New multi-threaded purge

New adaptive hashing algorithm
Less buffer pool contention
Better, more consistent query execution via persistent optimizer statistics that are collected at more
regular, predictable intervals

The net result of these improvements is reflected in the SysBench read/write benchmarks shown here:

Figure 3: SysBench Read Write TPS Performance Gains over MySQL 5.5

For Linux, MySQL 5.6 shows up to a 150% improvement in transactional TPS throughput over MySQL
5.5, while similar tests run on Windows 2008 reveal a 47% performance gain.

Better Read Only Workload Throughput

New optimizations have been made to InnoDB for read only transactions that greatly improve the
performance of high concurrency web-based lookups and report-generating applications. These
optimizations bypass transactional overhead and are enabled by default when autocommit = 1, or can
be atomically controlled by the developer using the new START_TRANSACTION_READ_ONLY syntax:
SET autocommit = 0;
START_TRANSACTION_READ_ONLY;
SELECT c FROM T1 WHERE id=N;
COMMIT;
The results of these optimizations are shown here:

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Page 5

Figure 4: SysBench Read Only TPS Performance Gains over MySQL 5.5
For Linux, MySQL 5.6 shows up to a 230% improvement in read only TPS throughput over MySQL 5.5,
while similar tests run on Windows 2008 show a 65% performance gain.
For context, all benchmarks shown above were run on the following platform configuration:

Oracle Linux 6
Intel(R) Xeon(R) E7540 x86_64
MySQL leveraging:
48 of 96 available CPU threads
2 GHz, 512GB RAM

The SysBench benchmark tool is freely available for application use-case specific benchmarks and can
be downloaded here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/benchmarks.html.

Better Performance with Solid State Drives (SSD)

Spinning disks are among the most common bottlenecks on any system, simply because they have
mechanical parts that physically limiit the ability to scale as concurrency grows. As a result, many MySQL
applications are being deployed on SSD enabled systems which provide the memory-based speed and
reliability required to support the highest levels of concurrency on todays web-based systems. With this
in mind, MySQL 5.6 includes several key enhancements designed specifically for use with SSD,
including:

Support for smaller 4k and 8k page sizes to better fit the standard storage algorithm of SSD.
Portable .ibd (InnoDB data) files that allow hot InnoDB tables to be easily moved from the default
data directory to SSD or network storage devices.
Separate tablespaces for the InnoDB unlog log that optionally moves the undo log out of the
system tablespace into one or more separate tablespaces. The read-intensive I/O patterns for the
undo log make these new tablespaces good candidates to move to SSD storage, while keeping the
system tablespace on hard drive storage.

Learn about all supporting SSD optimizations here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodbperformance.html.

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Page 6

Better Query Execution Times and Diagnostics: Improved Optimizer

The MySQL 5.6 Optimizer has been re-factored for better efficiency and performance and provides an
improved feature set for better query execution times and diagnostics. They key 5.6 optimizer
improvements include:

Subquery Optimizations Using semi-JOINs and materialization, the MySQL Optimizer delivers
greatly improved subquery performance, simplifying how developers construct queries. Specifically,
the optimizer is now more efficient in handling subqueries in the FROM clause; materialization of
subqueries in the FROM clause is now postponed until their contents are needed during execution,
greatly improving performance. Additionally, the optimizer may add an index to derived tables during
execution to speed up row retrieval. Tests run using the DBT-3 benchmark Query #13, shown below,
demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in execution times (from days to seconds) over
1
previous versions.
select c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalprice,
sum(l_quantity)
from customer, orders, lineitem
where o_orderkey in (
select l_orderkey
from lineitem
group by l_orderkey
having sum(l_quantity) > 313
)
and c_custkey = o_custkey
and o_orderkey = l_orderkey
group by c_name, c_custkey, o_orderkey, o_orderdate, o_totalprice
order by o_totalprice desc, o_orderdate
LIMIT 100;

File Sort Optimizations with Small Limit For queries with ORDER BY and small LIMIT values,
the optimizer now produces an ordered result set using a single table scan. These queries are
common in web applications that display only a few rows from a large result set such as:
SELECT col1, ... FROM t1 ... ORDER BY name LIMIT 10;

Internal benchmarks have shown up to a 4x improvement in query execution times which helps
2
improve overall user experience and response times.
Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) By default, the optimizer now pushes WHERE conditions down to
the storage engine for evaluation, table scan and return of ordered result set to the MySQL server.
CREATE TABLE person (
personid INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
firstname CHAR(20),
lastname CHAR(20),
postalcode INTEGER,
age INTEGER,
address CHAR(50),
KEY k1 (postalcode,age)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
SELECT lastname, firstname FROM person

1
2

http://oysteing.blogspot.com/2012/07/from-months-to-seconds-with-subquery.html
http://didrikdidrik.blogspot.com/2011/04/optimizing-mysql-filesort-with-small.html

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Page 7

WHERE postalcode BETWEEN 5000 AND 5500 AND age BETWEEN 21 AND 22;

Internal benchmarks on this type of table and query have shown up to 15x improved execution times
3
with the ICP default behavior.
Batched Key Access (BKA) and Multi-Range Read (MRR) The optimizer now provides the
storage engine with all primary keys in batches and enables the storage engine to access, order and
return the data more efficiently greatly improving query execution times.

Figure 5: Improved query execution times with MySQL 5.6 Batch Key Access and Multi-Range
Read

Together, BKA and MRR show up to 280x improvement in query execution times for DBT-3 Query 13
4
and other disk-bound query benchmarks.
Better Optimizer Diagnostics The MySQL 5.6 optimizer also provides better diagnostics and
debugging with:
EXPLAIN for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations,
EXPLAIN plan output in JSON format with more precise optimizer metrics and better
readability
Optimizer Traces for tracking the optimizer decision-making process.

Learn about all of MySQL 5.6 Optimizer improvements and features, along with all technical
documentation, here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

Better Application Availability: Online DDL/Schema Changes

Today's web-based applications are designed to rapidly evolve and adapt to meet business and revenuegeneration requirements. As a result, development SLAs are now most often measured in minutes vs
days or weeks. So when an application must quickly support new product lines or new products within
existing product lines, the backend database schema must adapt in kind, most commonly while the
application remains available for normal business operations. MySQL 5.6 supports this level of online
schema flexibility and agility by providing the following new ALTER TABLE DDL syntax additions:
3
4

http://olavsandstaa.blogspot.com/2011/04/mysql-56-index-condition-pushdown.html
http://oysteing.blogspot.com/2011/10/bacthed-key-access-speeds-up-disk-bound.html

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Page 8

CREATE INDEX
DROP INDEX
Change AUTO_INCREMENT value for a column
ADD/DROP FOREIGN KEY
Rename COLUMN
Change ROW FORMAT, KEY_BLOCK_SIZE for a table
Change COLUMN NULL, NOT_NULL
Add, drop, reorder COLUMN

DBAs and Developers can add indexes and perform standard InnoDB table alterations while the
database remains available for application updates. This is especially beneficial for rapidly evolving
applications where developers need schema flexibility to accommodate changing business requirements.
Learn about all of MySQL 5.6 InnoDB online DDL improvements and features, along with all technical
documentation, here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-online-ddl.html.

Better Developer Agility: NoSQL Access to InnoDB

Many of the latest generation of web, cloud, social and mobile applications require fast operations against
simple Key/Value pairs. At the same time, they must retain the ability to run complex queries against the
same data, as well as ensure the data is protected with ACID guarantees. With the new NoSQL API for
InnoDB, developers have all the benefits of a transactional RDBMS, coupled with the performance
capabilities of Key/Value store.
MySQL 5.6 provides simple, key-value interaction with InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API.
Implemented via a new Memcached daemon plug-in to mysqld, the new Memcached protocol is mapped
directly to the native InnoDB API and enables developers to use existing Memcached clients to bypass
the expense of query parsing and go directly to InnoDB data for lookups and transactional compliant
updates. The API makes it possible to re-use standard Memcached libraries and clients, while extending
Memcached functionality by integrating a persistent, crash-safe, transactional database back-end. The
implementation is shown here:

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Page 9

Figure 6: New NoSQL, key-value access to InnoDB Data via Memcached API
Not only do developers and DBAs get more performance and flexibility, they also reduce complexity as it
is possible to compress previously separate caching and database layers into a single data management
tier, as well as eliminate the overhead of maintaining cache consistency.
Learn more about the details and how to get started with the new Memcached API to InnoDB here
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-memcached.html.

Better Developer Agility: Extended InnoDB Use Cases

New MySQL 5.6 optimizations and features extend InnoDB into more use cases so developers can
simplify applications by standardizing on a single storage engine.

New Full Text Search (FTS) Provided as a better alternative to MyISAM FTS, InnoDB now enables
developers to build FULLTEXT indexes on InnoDB tables to represent text-based content and speed
up application searches for words and phrases.
InnoDB full-text search supports Natural
language/Boolean modes, proximity search and relevance ranking. A simple use case example looks
like:
CREATE TABLE quotes
(id int unsigned auto_increment primary key
, author varchar(64)
, quote varchar(4000)
, source varchar(64)
, fulltext(quote)
) engine=innodb;
SELECT author AS Apple" FROM quotes
WHERE match(quote) against (apple' in natural language mode);

New Transportable Tablespaces InnoDB .ibd files created in file-per-table mode are now
transportable between physical storage devices and database servers; when creating a table
developers can now designate a storage location for the .idb file outside of the MySQL data directory.
This enables hot or busy tables to be easily moved to an external network storage device (SSD,
HDD) that does not compete with application or database overhead. This new feature also enables
quick, seamless application scale by allowing users to easily export/import InnoDB tables between
running MySQL servers, as shown here:
Example Export:
CREATE TABLE t(c1 INT) engine=InnoDB;
FLUSH TABLE t FOR EXPORT; -- quiesce the table and create the meta data
file
$innodb_data_home_dir/test/t.cfg
UNLOCK TABLES;
Corresponding Import:
CREATE TABLE t(c1 INT) engine=InnoDB; -- if it doesn't already exist
ALTER TABLE t DISCARD TABLESPACE;
-- The user must stop all updates on the tables, prior to the IMPORT
ALTER TABLE t IMPORT TABLESPACE;

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Page 10

The InnoDB improvements noted here are by no means exhaustive. The complete accounting of all
MySQL
5.6
features,
along
with
all
technical
documentation,
is
available
here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

Improved Replication and High Availability

Replication is the most widely used MySQL feature for scale-out and High Availability (HA) and MySQL
5.6 includes new features designed to enable developers building next generation web, cloud, social and
mobile applications and services with self-healing replication topologies and high performance master
and slaves. The key features include:

New Global Transactions Identifiers (GTIDs) GTIDs enable replication transactional integrity to
be tracked through a replication master/slave topology, providing a foundation for self-healing
recovery, and enabling DBAs and developers to easily identify the most up to date slave in the event
of a master failure. Built directly into the Binlog stream, GTIDs eliminate the need for complex thirdparty add-ons to provide this same level of tracking intelligence.

Figure 7: GTID positioning in the Binlog

New MySQL Replication utilities A new set of Python Utilities are designed to leverage the new
replication GTIDs to provide replication administration and monitoring with automatic fail-over in the
event of a failed master, or switchover in the event of maintenance to the master.
New Multi-threaded Slaves - Splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing
updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads
that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems.

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Multi-Threaded Slave Performance

Queries per Second

300
250
200
150
100
50
0
QPS

10

58.11

144.4

282.53

Worker Threads
Figure 8: MySQL 5.6 Multi-threaded Slave performance gains

SysBench benchmarks using a graduated number of worker threads across 10 schemas show up to
5
5x in performance gain with multi-threading enabled.
New Binary Log Group Commit (BGC) In MySQL 5.6 replication masters now group writes to the
Binlog rather than committing them one at a time, significantly improving performance on the master
side of the topology. BGC also enables finer grained locking which reduces lock waits, again, adding
to the performance gain, shown here:

Figure 9: MySQL 5.6 Bin Log Group Commit performance gains

MySQL 5.6 shows up to a 180% performance gain over 5.5 in master server throughput with
replication enabled (Binlog=1). BGC largely eliminates the trade-off users had to make between
performance overhead to the master and the scale-out, HA benefits offered by MySQL replication.

https://blogs.oracle.com/MySQL/entry/benchmarking_mysql_replication_with_multi

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New Optimized Row-based Replication MySQL 5.6 provides a new option variable binlogrow-image=minimal that enables applications to replicate only data elements of the row image that
have changed following DML operations. This improves replication throughput for both the master
and slave(s) and minimizes binary log disk space, network resource and server memory footprint.
New Crash-Safe Slaves MySQL 5.6 stores Binlog positional data within tables so slaves can
automatically roll back replication to the last committed event before a failure, and resume replication
without administrator intervention. Not only does this reduce operational overhead, it also eliminates
the risk of data loss caused by a slave attempting to recover from a corrupted data file. Further, if a
crash to the master causes corruption of the binary log, the server will automatically recover it to a
position where it can be read correctly.
New Replication Checksums MySQL 5.6 ensure the integrity of data being replicated to a slave
by detecting data corruption and returning an error before corrupt events are applied to the slave,
preventing the slave itself from becoming corrupt.
New Time-delayed Replication MySQL 5.6 provides protection against operational errors made
on the master from propagating to attached slaves by allowing developers to add defined delays in
the replication stream. With configurable master to slave time delays, in the event of failure or
mishap, slaves can be promoted to the new master in order to restore the database to its previous
state. It also becomes possible to inspect the state of a database before an error or outage without
the need to reload a back up.

Learn about all of MySQL 5.6 Replication and High Availability improvements and features, along with all
technical documentation, here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html.
You can learn more about MySQL Replication and get practical, hands on experience using
these resources:
Introduction to MySQL Replication: http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysqlreplication-introduction.
Using MySQL Replication for Highly Available Applications:
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql-replication-high-availability.
MySQL Replication Hands On Tutorial: Configuration, Provisioning and Management:
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/mysql-replication-tutorial.

Improved Performance Schema

The MySQL Performance Schema was introduced in MySQL 5.5 and is designed to provide point in time
metrics for key performance indicators. MySQL 5.6 improves the Performance Schema in answer to the
most common DBA and developer problems. New instrumentations include:

Statements/Stages
What are my most resource intensive queries? Where do they spend time?
Table/Index I/O, Table Locks
Which application tables/indexes cause the most load or contention?
Users/Hosts/Accounts
Which application users, hosts, accounts are consuming the most resources?
Network I/O
What is the network load like? How long do sessions idle?
Summaries
Aggregated statistics grouped by statement, thread, user, host, account or object.

The MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema is now enabled by default in the my.cnf file with optimized and
auto-tune settings that minimize overhead (< 5%, but mileage will vary), so using the Performance
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Page 13

Schema in a production environment to monitor the most common application use cases is less of an
issue. In addition, new atomic levels of instrumentation enable the capture of granular levels of resource
consumption by users, hosts, accounts, applications, etc. for billing and chargeback purposes in cloud
computing environments.
The MySQL docs are an excellent resource for all that is available and that can be done with the 5.6
Performance Schema.
See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/performance-schema.html for
complete details.

Improved Security
MySQL 5.6 introduces a major overhaul to how passwords are internally handled and encrypted. The
new options and features include:

New alternative to password in master.info MySQL 5.6 extends the replication START SLAVE
command to enable DBAs to specify master user and password as part of the replication slave
options and to authenticate the account used to connect to the master through an external
authentication plugin (user defined or those provided under MySQL Enterprise Edition). With these
options the user and password no longer need to be exposed in plain text in the master.info file.
New encryption for passwords in general query log, slow query log, and binary log
Passwords in statements written to these logs are no longer recorded in plain text.
New password hashing with appropriate strength Default password hashing for internal MySQL
server authentication via PASSWORD() is now done using the SHA-256 password hashing algorithm
using a random salt value.
New options for passwords on the command line MySQL 5.6 introduces a new scrambled
option/config file (.mylogin.cnf) that can be used to securely store user passwords that are used for
command line operations.
New change password at next login DBAs and developers can now control when account
passwords must be changed via a new password_expired flag in the mysql.user table.
New policy-based Password validations Passwords can now be validated for appropriate
strength, length, mixed case, special chars, and other user defined policies based on LOW, MEDIUM
and STRONG designation settings. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/validate-passwordplugin.html for details and available configuration options.

Learn about these and all of MySQL 5.6 Security improvements and features, along with all technical
documentation, here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

Other Important Enhancements

New default configuration optimizations MySQL 5.6 introduces changes to the server defaults
that provide better out-of-the-box performance on todays system architectures. These new defaults
are designed to minimize the upfront time spent on changing the most commonly updated variables
and configuration options.
See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-default-changes.html for a complete rundown of
what is changed, what parameters are auto sized based on environment, and what settings can be
set and controlled at server start up.
Improved TIME/TIMESTAMP/DATETIME Data Types:
TIME/TIMESTAMP/DATETIME Now allow microsecond level precision for more precise
time/date comparisons and data selection.
TIMESTAMP/DATETIME Improves on 5.5. by allowing developers to assign the current
timestamp, an auto-update value, or both, as the default value for TIMESTAMP and DATETIME
columns, the auto-update value, or both.

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Page 14

TIMESTAMP - Columns are now nullable by default. TIMESTAMP columns no longer get
DEFAULT NOW() or ON UPDATE NOW() attributes automatically without them being explicitly
specified and non-NULLable TIMESTAMP columns without explicit default value treated as
having no default value.
Better Condition Handling GET DIAGNOSTICS
MySQL 5.6 enables developers to easily check for error conditions and code for exceptions by
introducing the new MySQL Diagnostics Area and corresponding GET DIAGNOSTICS interface
command. The Diagnostic Area can be populated via multiple options and provides 2 kinds of
information:

Statement - which provides affected row count and number of conditions that occurred
Condition - which provides error codes and messages for all conditions that were returned by a
previous operation

The addressable items for each are:

The new GET DIAGNOSTICS command provides a standard interface into the Diagnostics Area and
can be used via the CLI or from within application code to easily retrieve and handle the results of the
most recent statement execution:
mysql> DROP TABLE test.no_such_table;
ERROR 1051 (42S02): Unknown table 'test.no_such_table'
mysql> GET DIAGNOSTICS CONDITION 1
-> @p1 = RETURNED_SQLSTATE, @p2 = MESSAGE_TEXT;
mysql> SELECT @p1, @p2;
+-------+------------------------------------+
| @p1
| @p2
|
+-------+------------------------------------+
| 42S02 | Unknown table 'test.no_such_table' |
+-------+------------------------------------+

Options
for
leveraging
the
MySQL
Diagnotics
Area
are
detailed
here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/diagnostics-area.html.
GET
DIAGNOTICS is well
documented here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/get-diagnostics.html.
Improved IPv6 Support
MySQL 5.6 improves INET_ATON() to convert and store string-based IPv6 addresses as binary
data for minimal space consumption.
MySQL 5.6 changes the default value for the bind-address option from 0.0.0.0 to 0::0 so the
MySQL server accepts connections for all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. You can learn more here
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-options.html#option_mysqld_bind-address.

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Page 15

Improved Partitioning
Improved performance for tables with large number of partitions MySQL 5.6 now performs and
scales on highly partitioned systems, specifically for INSERT operations that span upwards of
hundreds of partitions.
Import/export tables to/from partitioned tables - MySQL 5.6 enables users to exchange a table
partition or sub-partition with a table using the ALTER TABLE ... EXCHANGE PARTITION
statement; existing rows in a partition or subpartition can be moved to a non-partitioned table, and
conversely, any existing rows in a non-partitioned table can be moved to an existing table
partition
or
sub-partition.
Learn
more
by
visiting
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/partitioning-management-exchange.html.
Explicit partition selection - MySQL 5.6 supports explicit selection of partitions and subpartitions
that are checked for rows matching a given WHERE condition. Similar to automatic partition
pruning, the partitions to be checked are specified/controlled by the issuer of the statement, and
is supported for both queries and a number of DML statements (SELECT, DELETE, INSERT,
REPLACE,
UPDATE,
LOAD
DATA,
LOAD
XML).
Learn more by visiting
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/partitioning-selection.html.
Improved GIS: Precise spatial operations - MySQL 5.6 provides geometric operations via
precise object shapes that conform to the OpenGIS standard for testing the relationship between
two
geometric
values.
Learn
more
by
referencing
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/functions-for-testing-spatial-relations-between-geometricobjects.html#functions-that-test-spatial-relationships-between-geometries
Learn about these and all of MySQL 5.6 improvements and features, along with all technical
documentation, here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html.

MySQL 5.6: Production Ready Software and Support

MySQL is the most popular open source database in use today and is available under the GNU General
Public License (GPL). For DBAs and developers building next generation business-critical applications
and services, MySQL 5.6 is fully available for development, QA and production use and can be deployed
with confidence under Oracles Premier Lifetime Support services. MySQL 5.6 is available under several
commercial licensing options that allow users to develop, deploy, monitor and backup the most secure,
up to date versions of MySQL, all with the backing of Oracles 24x7x365 technical support.
The MySQL commercially available software and services available as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition
include:

MySQL Database The most secure and up to date version of MySQL is used to power the most
demanding online, web, cloud and OLTP applications and services. The MySQL commercial server
is a fully integrated transaction-safe, ACID compliant database with full commit, rollback, crashrecovery and row level locking capabilities. MySQL is known for its performance, reliability and easeof-use across all Linux, UNIX, Mac OSX and Windows platforms.
MySQL Enterprise Scalability - To meet the sustained performance and scalability of ever
increasing user, query and data loads MySQL Enterprise Edition provides the MySQL Thread Pool.
The Thread Pool provides a highly scalable, queue-based thread-handling model designed to reduce
overhead in managing client connections and statement execution threads.
MySQL Enterprise Security - MySQL Enterprise Edition provides ready to use external
authentication modules so DBAs and developers can easily integrate MySQL with existing security
infrastructures, including Linux Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) and Windows Active
Directory.

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Page 16

MySQL Enterprise Audit - MySQL Enterprise Edition provides an easy to use, policy-based auditing
solution that helps developers implement stronger security controls and satisfy regulatory compliance
without changes to existing applications.
MySQL Enterprise High Availability - MySQL Enterprise Edition offers a wide range of solutions for
database high availability, to automatically detect and recover from failures - whether these occur at
the network, host, OS or database layer - as well as minimize downtime resulting from scheduled
maintenance activities.
MySQL Enterprise Backup Performs non-blocking, online backups of MySQL databases. MySQL
Enterprise Backup also supports full, incremental and partial backups with compression as well as
point-in-time recovery.
MySQL Enterprise Monitor and Query Analyzer Continuously monitors MySQL databases and
proactively alerts DBA to potential problems, queries and tuning opportunities before they impact key
systems or applications. The Monitor provides a set of MySQL expert advisors that provide insight
and detailed guidance on fixing and tuning MySQL configurations and variables for optimal security,
performance and availability. The built-in, advanced Query Analyzer allows developers to visually
find and tune expensive query code without the need for Slow Query Log, SHOW PROCESS LIST or
other labor intensive methods.
MySQL Workbench Provides GUI-based data modeling, SQL development, deployment, database
migration and comprehensive administrative tools (server configuration, user administration, object
management) for database architects, developers, and DBAs.
Oracle Premier Lifetime Support for MySQL Provide direct access to expert MySQL Support
engineers who are ready to assist users in the development, deployment, and management of
MySQL applications. The MySQL Support team is composed of seasoned MySQL developers and
database experts who understand the issues and challenges users face because they've overcome
these same challenges themselves.

Conclusion
MySQL is the most popular and widely used open source database in the world because of its
performance, reliability and ease of use. MySQL 5.6 builds on this momentum by providing DBAs and
developers with the added performance, scalability and across the board improvements needed when
building the next generation of web-based, cloud-based and embedded applications and services. In
quick summary:

The MySQL 5.6 internal stack has been overhauled and re-factored to fully utilize the computing
power of todays development frameworks and multi-processing architectures across all platforms.
For pure, optimized performance and scale, MySQL 5.6 includes improvements to InnoDB that
remove legacy bottlenecks and contention.
Innovations such as on-line schema changes and NoSQL access to the database enable MySQL to
serve the most demanding application requirements without compromising on ACID-compliance and
SQL query power.
The optimizer has been re-factored for more efficient query execution and diagnostic reporting for
better debugging and analysis of underlying decision paths.
Replication has been improved to ensure that masters and slaves remain in synch, with better auto
recovery options, higher data integrity and overall application availability. New replication utilities
provide DBAs with configurable, automated options for ensuring the highest levels of application failover and recovery.
Finally, the new Performance Schema provides DBAs and Developers with better instrumentation
and insight into MySQL database performance metrics so they have an understanding of where their
applications spend precious resources and where they can be tuned for optimal performance.

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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These improvements, further demonstrating that Oracle drives MySQL innovation, make MySQL 5.6 the
best release of the database ever.

Learn More
MySQL 5.6 Downloads
http://www.mysql.com/downloads/

MySQL 5.6 Documentation

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/

MySQL Enterprise Edition

http://mysql.com/products/enterprise/

MySQL Customers and Case Studies

http://www.mysql.com/customers

MySQL Professional Services and Consulting

http://mysql.com/consulting/
For more information on Oracles MySQL products and services, please visit:
http://www.mysql.com/products/.

Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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