Oracle announced the general availability of MySQL 5.5 with a number
of enhancements aimed at improving performance and scalability and a
focus on Windows.
The company unveiled the release candidate for the open-source database in
September at the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 conference in San
Francisco. At the time, the company touted moves meant to bolster
performance–particularly improvements to InnoDB, now MySQL’s default
storage engine.
But the company also had its eye on Windows users as well.
Some of the key performance enhancements specific
to Windows in MySQL 5.5 include Windows native RW-locks, Windows native
atomic increments and lightweight native Windows serialization
primitives.
“We’re also focusing on Windows in a big way, because Windows is the
No. 1 development platform for MySQL...so a lot of work has been done in
5.5 to make it a great fit for Windows,” said Monica Kumar, senior
director of product marketing at Oracle.
As for InnoDB,
Oracle has made a number of changes under the hood, including
adding the ability to enable multiple buffer pool instances.
“The way we’ve gone about this is first of all when Oracle and
MySQL/Sun (Microsystems) joined, we had the InnoDB team together with
the MySQL team…sit down in a much (more) sort of closer, cooperative
way to work through the bottlenecks in the server,” said Tomas
Ulin, vice president of MySQL development at Oracle.
Oracle also added new semi-synchronous replication and improved index and table partitioning.
"We have been using MySQL since 2003 to power our Subscriber Data
Management solution," said Richard Bodin, Senior Manager for the
Subscriber Data Management Product Line at Tekelec, in a statement.
"MySQL replication is a key component of our multi-layer scalability
and high-availability framework. The semi-synchronous replication
capabilities built into MySQL 5.5 will enable us to further enhance
data integrity for our customers, helping deliver a complete view of
subscribers across any network domain for new levels of insight,
agility and operational efficiency."
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