MySQL 5.4 Brings Scalability, Performance Improvements

Published: April 28, 2009

by Alex Woodie

Sun Microsystems took a moment last week, as it was getting prepared to be eaten by Oracle, to announce a new release of MySQL, the open source relational database management system it bought for $1 billion just over a year ago. MySQL 5.4 brings scalability enhancements for X64 and Chip Multi-threaded (CMT) servers, while general performance enhancements will help users running the software on all types of servers, including IBM Power Systems boxes.

When paired with the InnoDB storage engine, which coincidentally is owned by Oracle, MySQL 5.4 can really scale. With InnoDB powering MySQL, Sun says, the duo can scale up to run on 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers. (Sun has been moving its SPARC chip architecture toward CMT for the last few years.)

The new database also brings new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements that can result in up to 90 percent better response times for certain types of analytical queries. "Without any modifications to your applications, MySQL 5.4 will transparently increase the performance and scalability of your applications, to enable them to scale under more demanding user and data processing loads," said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of Sun's MySQL and Software Infrastructure Group, during the keynote address at last week's MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, California.

Other improvements were made in the areas of stored procedures, prepared statements access to information schemas, and DTrace support on Sun Solaris.

A preview of MySQL 5.4 is currently available for 64-bit versions of Linux and Solaris 10. Sun also intends to support the new database on IBM i OS, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, and Free BSD. The general availability date for MySQL 5.4 will be announced later this year.

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