Oracle’s MySQL 5.6 spans to NoSQL to offer more agility

Oracle has released a new version of MySQL. Version 5.6 will continue to hit the “sweet spot of the web market”, said Tomas Ulin, vice-president of engineering.

The new version of the open source database will, said Oracle in a press statement: “Improve developer agility with subquery optimisations, online Data Definition Language (DDL) operations, NoSQL access to [storage engine] InnoDB, new instrumentation in performance schema and better condition handling.”

Computer Weekly recently reported on the experience of King.com, an online gaming company that moved beyond MySQL in favour of Hadoop because it hit a performance ceiling. The increased data volumes that came with games on Facebook were too much for the company’s relational MySQL database. 

“If you are in a production environment with MySQL, you need to wait too long. Even adding a column takes time,” said Mats-Olov Eriksson, director of data warehousing at King.com.

Wes Biggs, chief technology officer at Adfonic, a mobile advertising company that serves up to 50,000 ad requests per second, said he saw an industry convergence between relational SQL and non-relational NoSQL. Oracle’s new version of MySQL, with its NoSQL access to InnoDB, could be a sign of this, he said. 

“It is interesting how much the SQL and NoSQL worlds are converging. What Oracle is doing with MySQL is very indicative of that,” said Biggs.

Oracle’s Tomas Ulin said: “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”.

In the same statement, Carl Olofson, research vice-president for database management and data integration software at IDC said: "With this latest release, Oracle shows its ongoing commitment to the MySQL community. 

"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."