Sitting at the Hilton in San Francisco, listening to the MySQL Connect opening Keynotes, sparks interesting thoughts. Thoughts about the future of MySQL, the Oracle stewardship, the MariaDB alternative and the advantage of the solutions provided by the MySQL Ecosystem.
But there is something missing. I know something is not part of this picture, but I can't figure out what it is.
At the end of keynotes and pane,l I turn to the exhibitors area, an approx 800 sq ft., 50% occupied by Oracle. At the bottom left corner stands my answer.
The small yellow cubic hive of AWS was at the top of the rollup that reminds of MySQL and RDS, admittedly the most used version of MySQL in the cloud so far. And here is the missing part.
New great features in 5.6 Release Candidate and in MySQL Cluster 7.3
The new features packed into 5.6 are simply awesome - my Brit friends will forgive me here, I tend to use local terms, but I can always turn them into "wonderful". The additions to InnoDB will make a big difference for many users and they will fill the gap between the power that the new hardware can bring and the what MySQL can use. Benchmarks show a great improvement in scalability with 48 and 96 core machines. Not bad at all. Equally important, online DDL additions will make the life of DBAs much easier and ultimately they will bring better availability.
MySQL Cluster 7.3 is also a good release. Personally, I am less interested in the new foreign key addition: I still believe that somebody who decides to use MySQL Cluster should not bother too much about foreign keys, but I perfectly understand that some users may have different needs.
It is also good to see DRBD back in the list of the HA solutions provided by Oracle, although I would say this is a bit far from "driving innovation" and that today there are more options in terms of HA, compared to 5 years ago.
What about MariaDB 10?
Some of the features announced in 5.6 today are already available in MariaDB 5.5 or they are present in the new version of MariaDB 10.
Subquery optimisation has been available in MariaDB for years now - I have not checked the details of what is here and what is there, but in general I would say that this is really a catch-up for Oracle. So is the replication group commit that people can enjoy in GA fashion in MariaDB 5.5.
The other additions for replication - the Global Transaction ID, multi-threaded options etc. - have been announced in MariaDB 10 few weeks ago. Personally I have not checked the differences yet.
And where is the Cloud?
We can argue that almost all the new features in 5.6 and in MariaDB 10 will help users in deploying MySQL in the cloud. What is missing is a good set of real cloud features. Some of these features, like JSON, HTTP, Javascript and NoSQL options have been mentioned by Tomas and what will come next, but that means that they are at least another 2 years away.
Multi-tenancy capabilities, data encryption and obfuscation, multi-protocol communication, NoSQL integration, in-server sharding and data aggregation are some of the features we are looking for. I am perfectly conscious that this is a bit too much to ask at this stage, but I believe that if we want to tag MySQL with the word Innovation, you must couple it with the equally valid word Cloud.
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@Ivan
what happened to this post:
http://izoratti.blogspot.dk/2012/09/5610-how-does-it-matter.html
.. "does not exist" for me! But the planet links to it. Maybe a 'black hole' in the MySQL Universe? :-)
-- Peter Laursen
Anonymous said...
September 30, 2012 at 8:44 AM
Oh - that is the same blog, the title is different. My native English friends pointed out that the title did not make any sense... :)
Ivan said...
October 1, 2012 at 5:37 PM
The "Cloud" features might be available in less than 2 years. They might be introduced as an plugin just like the audit plugin they announced.
Daniël van Eeden said...
October 2, 2012 at 7:58 PM
That would be really good, but it has not been announced. I am looking forward to hearing more on this topic!
Ivan said...
October 3, 2012 at 1:12 AM