Oracle has released the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate at MySQL Connect along with more fully featured commercial versions.

Oracle used its first MySQL Connect conference in San Francisco to release a set of updated MySQL technologies. The Release Candidate for MySQL 5.6 was released, along with a 'developer milestone' version of MySQL Cluster 7.3, the version designed to run across multiple servers. A more fully featured version of the commercial version of MySQL, MySQL Enterprise, was also announced.

First previewed in July 2011, MySQL 5.6 includes the Memcached API to improve the performance when storing and retrieving database entries, and the MySQL Optimizer has been updated with new techniques of selecting, sorting and returning results. Databases based on MySQL’s InnoDB storage engine will handle concurrency better, and will also be able to make use of full-text search.

The query optimizer has also been improved with support for subquery optimizations, and the addition of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) and Batch Key Access (BKA). Oracle claims this can improve selected query throughput by up to 280 times.

Alongside the MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate, Oracle also released the first Development Milestone Release (DMR) of MySQL Cluster 7.3. This release adds native support for foreign keys so tables can be cross indexed. Until now cross indexes had to be written as part of your applications in MySQL Cluster. The new version also comes with a Node.js API so data can be accessed directly without the need to translate the query to SQL. A final improvement to MySQL Cluster 7.3 is a new installer that can automatically discover the hardware environment of the servers such as the number or processor cores and the CPU architecture.

Controversially, Oracle also announced improvements to MySQL Enterprise Edition, the commercial arm of MySQL. This will now offer high availability improvements including automatic failover and replication. Enterprise Edition has also been improved with the auditing and compliance reporting capability.

Oracle’s concentration on the commercial arms of MySQL is increasingly encouraging open-source developers to look to open-source alternatives such as MariaDB.

The MySQL 5.6 RC is available for immediate download and community testing.

MySQL 5.6.3 Beta available for download

Preview of MySQL 5.6.5

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