MySQL 5.6 is out now and that is good news. I have already been using pre-GA versions on some production servers with good success and now that the few wrinkles I have seen have been ironed out, I am sure a lot of people will find the new features in 5.6 well worth waiting for.

However, that does lead to the question of: “what next?”

I still have several things that I would like to see in MySQL in no specific order of preference such as:

• Session transaction state exposed as a variable to allow you to determine if you have started a transaction or not, and thus allowing you to use BEGIN WORK, ROLLBACK or COMMIT as needed.  This information is available via the C API I believe but not via SQL.  Something like @@in_transaction = 1.  Makes modular programming easier.
• Table space management. The default behaviour now in 5.6 is to move to innodb_file_per_table = 1, but really on a large …

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email …

I have been using this SQL*Plus command for a while now:

SQL> show spparameter service_names

SID      NAME          TYPE        VALUE
-------- ------------- ----------- ---------
*        service_names string      REDX

And guess what ?

• The right syntax is actually show spparameters (with a “s” at the end of it).
• It’s an 11g New Feature!

It doesn’t work with 10g:

SQL> show spparameters service_names

SP2-0735: unknown SHOW option beginning "spparamete..."
SP2-0735: unknown SHOW option beginning "service_na..."

I thought MySQL was trying to become as big as Oracle but it could be that Oracle is trying to become as cool as MySQL — it has had something like this for a long time! Now Oracle should add SHOW TABLES too.

Anyway, this is really 11g’s most useful feature so far, though. …