Over the past few years, we’ve seen MySQL technology advance in leaps and bounds, especially when it comes to scalability. But by focusing on the internals of the storage engine for so long, MySQL has fallen behind regarding support for advanced SQL features.

SQLite, another popular open-source SQL database, just released version 3.8.3, including support for recursive SQL queries using the WITH RECURSIVE syntax, in compliance with SQL:1999.

Why is this significant? It means that MySQL is now the only widely-used SQL implementation that does not support recursive queries. Fifteen years after it was defined in the SQL standard, almost every other SQL database of note has supported this feature:

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I get a lot of questions about Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.6 (PXC 5.6), specifically about whether such and such MySQL 5.6 Community Edition feature is in PXC 5.6.  The short answer is: yes, all features in community MySQL 5.6 are in Percona Server 5.6 and, in turn, are in PXC 5.6.  Whether or not the new feature is useful in 5.6 really depends on how useful it is in general with Galera.

I thought it would be useful to highlight a few features and try to show them working:

Innodb Fulltext Indexes

Yes, FTS works in Innodb in 5.6, so why wouldn’t it work in PXC 5.6?  To test this I used the Sakila database , which contains a single table with FULLTEXT.  In the sakila-schema.sql file, it is still designated a MyISAM table:

When I have discovered MySQL User-defined variables at the first time, I didn’t pay much attention to them and didn’t realize their strength. At first, one can think that they are just one of the many unnoticed MySQL features. Well, I was wrong. Here, I will try to summarize their strength, though I think there is […]