MySQL 5.6.16 Overview and Highlights

MySQL 5.6.16 was recently released (it is the latest MySQL 5.6, is GA), and is available for download here:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.6.html

As opposed to the latest 5.5 release, this latest 5.6 release has quite a few more bug fixes, but that’s expected since 5.5 has been GA for much longer.

There were 2 minor functionality changes:

  • Previously, ALTER TABLE in MySQL 5.6 could alter a table such that the result had temporal columns in both 5.5 and 5.6 format. Now ALTER TABLE upgrades old temporal columns to 5.6 format for ADD COLUMN, CHANGE COLUMN, MODIFY COLUMN, ADD INDEX, and FORCE operations. This conversion cannot be done using the INPLACE algorithm, so specifying ALGORITHM=INPLACE in these cases results in an error. (Bug #17246318)
  • CMake now supports a -DTMPDIR=dir_name option to specify the default tmpdir value. If unspecified, the value defaults to P_tmpdir in . Thanks to Honza Horak for the patch. (Bug #68338, Bug #16316074)

I counted 80 bug fixes, 32 of which were InnoDB-related (and some of thoese also memcached-related), 2 partitioning-related, 8 replication-related, and the remaining covered a variety of areas.

I won’t go into all 80 bugs, but if you’re running memcached and/or InnoDB with MySQL 5.6, you should definitely consider upgrading to the latest 5.6.16. And if not, but you’re still running 5.6, I’d recommend reviewing the full changelogs, to see whether you should upgrade asap or not.

Lastly, there was one “known limitation” added, which is:

  • Building MySQL from source on Windows using Visual Studio 2008 fails with an identifier not found error. Later versions of Visual Studio are unaffected. The workaround is to set the CMake build option, INNODB_PAGE_ATOMIC_REF_COUNT, to OFF. This option is ON by default.

So this is very minor, and only related to those building MySQL on Windows using VS 2008. VS 2008 is quite old anyway, but there is the work-around if you’re still using t.

The full changelogs can be viewed here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.6/en/news-5-6-16.html

And in case you missed it, there is a great post from Morgan Tocker giving thanks to each community member involved in each bug reported/fixed in 5.6.16! What a nice combination of both old and new names and folks from all different companies! That sure shows how active and thriving the MySQL ecosystem really is!