MySQL 5.4 preview released

At the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, Sun released a preview of the next version of MySQL, 5.4. Development has focussed on improving how the database scales on multi-core processors. A patch from Google for the SMP handing within InnoDB was added to improve lock performance and a new lock free system for threads introduced. According to the release notes, for systems with 256 threads, performance can be increased by about 15 per cent, but systems with a low thread count will see a 1 per cent performance decrease.

The open source database also sees a number of improvements in query operations with faster sub-query execution and use of main memory for multi-way joins, more robust error management for stored procedures and an enhanced information schema, allowing ODBC and JDBC drivers to obtain more meta-data for those stored procedures.

The developers have been, primarily, optimising for the InnoDB storage engine, with patches from Google to improve the InnoDB I/O subsystems performance also being incorporated. MySQL 5.4 comes with DTrace probes which can be used on Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. The probes allow administrators and developers to use DTrace scripts to examine the query performance of MySQL.

The preview release is available to download now, in binary form for 64-bit Linux and 64-bit Solaris on SPARC/AMD/Intel. It is also available in source form.

(djwm)