Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) released the latest development version of MySQL — Development Milestone 5.7.4 — along with a number of add-ons to help manage databases earlier today. The new version provides a number of important upgrades, including a major boost in query-handling speed. MySQL Version 5.6, which is the current version of the popular database OS, was released in February 2013.
Doubles query-handling speed
According to Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL)’s statement, the newest version of MySQL has been benchmarked as capable of responding to 512,000 read-only queries per second, more than double 250,000 read-only QPS of MySQL 5.6.
Performance of the Memcached caching plug-in has also been significantly upgraded in this version, and can now offer a read-only throughput of over a million QPS.
Statement from Oracle
“Such a sizable performance bump could help organizations save money in server purchases, because it would require fewer servers to run large jobs. Or, it will allow them to run complex queries that might have taken too long to run on earlier versions of the database system,” said Tomas Ulin, Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL)’s vice president of MySQL engineering. “It was not one single revision that Oracle made that improved the performance; rather it is the cumulative effect of many individual changes,” Ulin explained.
“We have to evolve to where the mainstream is,” Ulin said. “People won’t be happy if they upgraded from a 16-core to 32-core machine and they get no benefit.”
MySQL becoming more modular
Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) has also begun redesigning the MySQL code to make it more modular. Currently, the software’s parser, optimizer and replication capabilities are all being rewritten in modular form.
“MySQL is a codebase that stems back, in some parts, to the 1980s,” Ulin explained, noting that MySQL growth over the years was multi-directional and not well integrated. “To be frank, the whole architecture wasn’t well thought out for the end-product,” Ulin said.
A modularized MySQL will make things much easier for third-party developers, given each particular set of functionality will have a unique interface unlike other parts of the software.
