One of the surprises of MySQL 5.6 was that the mysql.host table was missing. How did I realize it? Because make_sandbox, the basic installation brick of MySQL Sandbox failed to complete. What happened is that MySQL Sandbox, before claiming success, checks if some key elements are available. One of such elements is the 'host' table, which, unbeknown to me, had been deprecated, and was eventually removed in yesterday's release. As a result, installation of MySQL 5.6.7 fails.

The fix is quite easy, and I released it today. It is available in MySQL Sandbox 3.0.26, which you can get from Launchpad and CPAN.

This fix is minimal because it barely allows you to install MySQL 5.6. However, there are additional issues …

There’s nothing like hearing directly from the developers.  As an Oracle employee, I’ve already learned a lot about MySQL 5.6 and other recent updates.  Nevertheless, I was impressed with a few new updates mentioned during the keynote.  Here’s a list of items that caught my attention (disclaimer: this is a partial list)

**Performance — with the group commit feature in 5.6 and other 5.6 performance improvements, the overhead of sync_binlog=1 is less than 10%.  In fact, with binlog enabled, 5.6 is faster than 5.5 without binlog enabled.

**Audit Extension — Oracle offers a dynamic plugin for enabling auditing for Sarbanes Oxley, PCI Compliance…  (note: this is a commercial feature which requires a subscription)

**Foreign Key support in MySQL Cluster — I find it ironic that at the same time NoSQL is becoming more popular; we’re also seeing very high demand for foreign key support in …

Following on from my post about MySQL Cluster sessions at the forthcoming Connect conference, its now the turn of MySQL Replication - another technology at the heart of scaling and high availability for MySQL.

Unless you've only just returned from a 6-month alien abduction, you will know that MySQL 5.6 includes the largest set of replication enhancements ever packaged into a single new release:

- Global Transaction IDs + HA utilities for self-healing cluster..(yes both automatic failover and manual switchover available!)

- Crash-safe slaves and binlog

- Binlog Group Commit and Multi-Threaded Slaves for high performance

- …

There has been a lot of talk about MySQL 5.6 replication improvements. With few exceptions, what I have seen was either marketing messages or hearsay. This means that few people have really tried out the new features to see whether they meet the users needs.

As usual, I did try the new version in my environment. I like to form my own opinion based on experiments, and so I have been trying out these features since they have appeared in early milestones.

What follows is a list of (potentially) surprising results that you may get when using MySQL 5.6.
All the examples are made using MySQL 5.6.6.

Gotcha #1 : too much noise

I have already mentioned that MySQL 5.6 is too verbose when creating data directory. This also means that your error log may have way more information than you'd like to get. …

On Wednesday May 16th, we ran a webinar to provide an overview of all of the new replication features and enhancements that are previewed in the MySQL 5.6 Development Release – including Global Transaction IDs, auto-failover and self-healing, multi-threaded, crash-safe slaves and more.

Collectively, these new capabilities enable MySQL users to scale for next generation web and cloud applications.

Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into how these new features are implemented. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the live webinar (note, you can listen to the On-Demand replay which is available now).

Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to …

The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did I end up with such a task? It's a long story. …

The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6.

As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to:

· Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data)

· Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog)

The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application …

When I install a MySQL package using MySQL Sandbox, if everything goes smoothly, I get an informative message on standard output, and I keep working.

This is OK

$HOME/opt/mysql/5.5.15/scripts/mysql_install_db --no-defaults \
  --user=$USER --basedir=$HOME/opt/mysql/5.5.15 \
  --datadir=$HOME/sandboxes/msb_5_5_15/data \
  --lower_case_table_names=2
Installing MySQL system tables...
OK
Filling help tables...
OK

To start mysqld at boot time you have to copy
support-files/mysql.server to the right place for your system

PLEASE REMEMBER TO SET A PASSWORD FOR THE MySQL root USER !
To do so, start the server, then issue the following commands:

/Users/gmax/opt/mysql/5.5.15/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/Users/gmax/opt/mysql/5.5.15/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h gmac4.local password 'new-password'

Alternatively you can run: …

In the yet to be released MySQL 5.6.6 DMR, there has been a change to the restriction of just one TIMESTAMP column with the DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP syntax. It is now possible for any TIMESTAMP to have either column defintion.

More information at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/news-5-6-5.html

On March 21st I will be in Paris, to attend the OTN MySQL Developers Day. Oracle is organizing these events all over the world, and although the majority are in the US, some of them are touching the good old European continent. Previous events were an all-Oracle show. Recently, the MySQL Community team has been asking for cooperation from the community, and in such capacity I am also presenting at the event, on the topic of testing early releases of MySQL in a sandbox. Of course, this is one of my favorite topics, but it is quite appropriate in this period, when Oracle has released a whole lot of preview features in its MySQL Labs. Which is another favorite topic of mine, since I was the one who insisted for having the Labs when I was working in the …