Oracle has released MySQL 5.7.6 developer milestone 16 and claims that its performance has improved by a factor of between two and three times compared to previous releases.

The InnoDB data engine has a number of improvements, including the refactoring needed in preparation for supporting general tablespaces. You can now use InnoDB to create a general tablespace using the CREATE TABLESPACE syntax, so you can choose your own mapping between tables and tablespaces.

Writing about the new DMR on the MySQL Server blog, Geir Hoydalsvik says that this means you could do things such as grouping all tables for a given user or customer within a single tablespace, and thus having all of their data within a single file on the filesystem.

Native partitioning support has also been added to InnoDB. Until now, partitioning support relied on the ha_partition handler, which created a new handler for each partition. This wasted resources when using many partitions. Native partitioning in InnoDB is the first step on the road to better overall partitioning, including things such as parallel query processing, improved partition pruning, foreign key support, global secondary indexes, and full-text searches on partitioned tables. The partitioning interface has also been separated into its own partitioning interface.

Other improvements to InnoDB include support for 32k and 64k pages to improve compression ratios; and support for high priority transactions. These are transactions that shall never be chosen to be aborted in a deadlock scenario. The support for high priority transactions improves support for Group Replication in MySQL, where a transaction cannot be aborted in one replica and committed in another.

A more general change is support for generated columns in CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE statements. Values of such columns are computed from an expression specified at column creation time. Generated columns can be virtual (computed “on the fly” when rows are read) or stored (computed when rows are inserted or updated). Uses for generated columns include simplifying queries when applications select from a table using a complex expression, simulating functional indexes, or substituting for views.

Full (and lengthy) release notes give details of more changes and the source code is available for download at dev.mysql.com, or on GitHub.

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