Preparing for my talk for Percona MySQL University in Raleigh,NC, Tuesday 29th of January I have created the outline of improvements available in MySQL 5.6 which I thought was worth sharing to give a feel for how massive work have been done for this release in variety of areas. I’m sure the list is not complete so If I miss something significant please let me know through the comment and I’ll update the page
Scalability
– Scalable Read Only Transactions
– Concurrent Innodb data file extension
– Non-Recursive Deadlock Detection
– Faster Locking Primitives
– Improved Innodb Thread Concurrency
– Multiple background Purge Threads
– Improved Purge lag control (now works)
– Split of “Kernel Mutex”
– Data Dictionary Cache
– Improved Adaptive Flushing
– Page Cleaner/Separate Flush Thread
– Group Commit for Binary Log
– Fight Cache Coherence and False Sharing issues
– Reduced Innodb Memory Fragmentation
– Reduced Locking for Partitioned tables
– Reduced Contention for LOCK_open
– Support for multiple table_open_cache instances
– Large (over 4GB) redo logs support
Optimizer and Execution
– Index Condition pushdown (ICP)
– Multi-Range-Read (MRR)
– Faster ORDER BY nidxcol LIMIT N
– Persistent Statistics for Innodb
– Improvements to Innodb Compression
– Fast Page Checksums (CRC32)
– 4K and 8K Page sizes for Innodb
– Improvement to Buffer Pool Flushing
– Subquery Optimizations
– More efficient Optimizer
Replication
– Optimized ROW Based Replication
– Multi-Threaded Slave
– Global Transaction Identifiers
– Crash Safe Slave and Binlog
– Replication Event Checksums
– Time Delayed Replication
– Server UUID
– Improved Logging for Row based Replication
– Replication Utilities for Failover and Admin
Transparency
– Many new INFORMATION_SCHEMA Tables
– – INNODB_METRICS
– – Meta Data Information Tables
– – Buffer Pool Information Tables
– Improved PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA
– – Reduced Overhead
– – Simplified Configuration
– – Table Access instrumentation
– – Statements instrumentation
– – Stages Instrumentation
– – Aggregations by User, Host etc
– – Network IO Instrumentation
– – Show Host Cache Contents
– – Improved File I/O Instrumentation
– Improved EXPLAIN
– – Explain for UPDATE/DELETE queries
– – JSON output with more information
– Optimizer Tracing
– Deadlock Logging
– GET DIAGNOSTICS
Operational Improvements
– Separate Tablespaces for Innodb Undo Logs
– Fast Restart – Preloading Innodb Buffer Pool
– Online DDL
– Import/Export for Partitioned Tables
– Remote Binlog Backup
– Innodb Transportable Tablespaces
– New configuration files defaults
– User Defined DATA DIRECTORY for Innodb Tables
– Connection Attributes
New Functionality for Developers
– MemcacheD API in Innodb
– Explicit Partition Selection in queries
– Full Text Search index for Innodb
– Microsecond TIME precision
– Precise spatial operations in GIS
Security
– Password hashes instead of plain passwords in Query Logs
– SHA256 hashing with Salt for Authentication
– Use obfuscated password storage for command line tools
– Policy Based password validation
– Plugin authentication support for Replication
