MySql 5.7 is coming!

Well, MySQL 5.7 RC has been announced these days.

What is an RC? The term RC is an acronym for the words Release Candidate, that is, a version of the program that is almost ready to be released to work in the production environment to which bugs are normally fixed but no new features are implemented. The first version available to developers of MySQL 5.7 Beta is 5.7.1 dated 04-23-2013, so Oracle engineers have been working on it for at least 2 years and given the numerous articles I have read, the work has been there and the results too!

There was a moment, between version 5.5 and 5.6 in which, in my personal opinion, the technical part didn't seem so active to me. Furthermore, even the release that came out didn't seem so full of new features to me.

Instead, let's look together at version 5.7 and the points that, for me, are among the most important and "greedy": Many DDL operations (change of table structure and data definition) are INPLACE, that is, while previously these operations blocked part of the database and forced the engine to copy the data to modify it, now the modification is made directly on the table involved.

Creation of indexes to tables in FAST mode, i.e. with speed reduced by up to 10 times. These are enormous benefits for those who have to maintain a database that cannot be taken offline.

Fulltext search and Spatial data types have also been ported to InnoDB, this was one of the few things that prevented you from thinking about not using MyIsam for some functionality. Among other things, for the Fulltext search part, a vocabulary system has also been implemented for oriental languages, but can also be used for others, which were not well supported before, giving less than optimal results. The only flaw, in my opinion, of this implementation is that the 2 Fulltext search systems, one on MyIsam and the other on InnoDB, give different results on the same set of data being searched.

Various optimizations to try not to use global LOCKs for single operations and therefore greater speed and scalability on large quantities of operations. A LOCK is a block of code that is executed in the program only by one process at a time, so as not to ruin data and structures. Therefore by not using them or creating specific, and not global ones, the operations are parallelized, increasing the speed of execution.

Even smarter SQL optimizer with reports available in Json format

Greater scalability with multicore systems: I have read articles in which the team documents having exceeded 1 million queries per second (link for the more technical)

Possible indexing of XML contents, finally without special tricks and constraints

Many of the settings that were previously "static", so called the MySQL configuration parameters read when MySQL is started and cannot be changed unless restarting the program, are now "dynamic" so they can be changed while the program runs. Among these, one of the most important for me, namely the change of the parameters for master - slave replication and innodb-buffer-pool-size for the memory given to InnoDB

Actually many other things ;-) http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/mysql-nutshell.html

It should be noted that many of the new features are applicable only to the ENGINES that support it, InnoDB for example supports all the new optimizations and reconfirms, if there was anything to be said, Oracle's path to shifting the focus to this transactional format, to the detriment of MyIsam, also in the internal system databases (see mysql database) to ensure greater stability and security for the entire system. On this line of thought the option to disable Innodb is deprecated and sends a warning by not executing the directive.

Well, I'm waiting for the final version to be able to put it "under the pressure" and test this new version in the field. Author