The MySQL Engineering Team at Oracle is excited to announce availability of Yum repositories for MySQL, making new releases of MySQL Database and related products easily accessible using Yum.  This initial release is focused on EL6-based distros as well as Fedora 18 and 19, and provides easy access to the most recent GA releases of our most popular products:

• MySQL Database 5.6
• MySQL Workbench 6.0
• MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.2

We expect to expand this in the future to offer additional MySQL products and versions using these repositories, as well as repositories for additional Linux distributions.

This effort benefits both end users and Linux distributions.  Users will have additional choice in deploying specific versions of MySQL products using their favored package manager, while Oracle helps reduce overhead in packaging MySQL for specific distributions.  For users, the benefits are:

• Ability to get MySQL components not yet packaged by their Linux distro.
• Access to the latest and greatest versions of MySQL, even if they have not yet been adopted by their Linux distro.
• Packages of MySQL products supported by Oracle.
• Easy early access to pre-GA product releases, such as MySQL 5.7 Development Milestone Releases.

Equally important in driving this effort is our continued and expanding commitment to Linux distributions.  For this audience, the key benefits are:

• Increased attention to packaging needs and concerns at Oracle means fewer opportunities for changes to be introduced which cause downstream packaging problems without awareness first at Oracle.
• Maintainers have access to our packages as a template for solutions to packaging issues.
• Oracle will have increased, distribution-specific experience and knowledge to draw upon in support of maintainer requests.
• Packaging work will start before product GA at Oracle, allowing packaging to mature concurrently with the product it supports.

We’re excited to get MySQL 5.6 – the best release of MySQL Database ever – into the hands of more users, and to invest more in supporting maintainers in their efforts to package MySQL products for use within their Linux distributions.  These packages have been extensively tested internally, fully supported, and install fully tested and supported MySQL products.  Listed below are several resources you may find useful in deploying MySQL using the Yum repositories:

• Repo package download
• Installing MySQL from Yum repository manual page
• Install & Repo forum
• Report bugs regarding repo packaging on bugs.mysql.com.

Please let us know about your experiences with these new repositories, as well as any suggestions you may have to improve the experience.  We welcome feedback – both bug reports and feature requests – via bugs.mysql.com (there is a new “MySQL Repositories” category).

Also have a look at Norvald’s blog post documenting the team’s work producing these packages

I’m excited about this year’s MySQL Connect in San Francisco. It’s bigger than ever, with 3 days of sessions, tutorials, and hands on labs.  We have more MySQL engineers going there than ever before. Looking at the keynote we are preparing, we have a lot of great news, and exciting benchmark numbers to share.

If you have a chance, make sure you join us this year. Learn about the latest MySQL engineering development, and use this opportunity to talk to the MySQL engineers themselves.

Hope to see you there, Tomas

On a regular basis I plan to summarize the latest news from MySQL Engineering. I hope you find it useful.

April highlights were the DMR’s coming out for both MySQL Cluster 7.3.2 and MySQL Server 5.7.1. For those that have been missing the launchpad versions of those, I apologize for the delay, but they should be there now if you want to dig into the changeset details. And to repeat what I’ve said in the past, there should not be a delay between releases on launchpad and src tar balls, so please keep bugging me when you see glitches there. Personally I also very much enjoyed the April Percona conference where I met a lot of old good friends and gave a keynote. You can see it here or just read the presentation. Here follows a summary of the engineering blogs from last month.

MySQL Support
The MySQL support team has some excellent blogs well worth reading.  The latest month includes for example “Migrating to InnoDB Full text search…”, “MySQL Utilities…”, and plenty of recent 5.6 info.

MySQL Performance Schema (PS)
This is a tremendously powerful tool, but it can be overwhelming to familiarize yourself with. Learn more about configuring performance schema from the author Marc Alff. Feel free to give him feedback directly on his blog, the good as well as constructive feedback. I’d also like to draw your attention to an older blog by Mark Leith, ps_helper. We are currently considering how we could include something like that in the product to make is easier to use PS. Ideas and input are greatfully received.

MySQL InnoDB
InnoDB continues to be the storage engine we focus on together with NDB for MySQL Cluster. You can learn more about the Data Organization in InnoDB, and the new 5.6 feature InnoDB transportable tablespaces and how to use them. Also have a look at Sunny’s presentation about 5.6 InnoDB features and scalability at Percona Live in April

MySQL Cluster and NoSQL
I mentioned the new DMR 7.3.1 for MySQL Cluster. Our efforts to improve ease of use of Cluster continues, please learn more about, and try out, the autoinstaller. MySQL Cluster was there as a “NoSQL” database long before the term was coined, and was just awarded the “storage engine of the year” the other week. This DMR also contains support for Foreign Keys which I know some of you have been waiting for. I’ll encourage the cluster engineers to write an in depth blog about the complexities in supporting foreign keys in a distributed databases. Meanwhile please get an overview here.

MySQL Performance
Dimitri is continuing his great work on benchmarking MySQL 5.6, comparing it with different 5.5 versions, including MariaDB and Percona servers. His blogs are excellent reads for anyone interested in MySQL performance.

MySQL Testing
In my keynote at Percona Live I talked about the big investment we have made in QA for MySQL. Please take a moment to learn about MySQL Server QA.

MySQL Replication and Big Data
MySQL 5.6 contains many new replication features, learn about the lesser known but equally important new replication features. Luis gave an excellent presentation at Percona Live on MySQL Replication, where you can learn more about performance enhancing features like multi-threaded slave and binary log group commit, as well as global transaction identifiers that can help you to do failover much better.

In my keynote at Percona Live I talked about how MySQL plays in important part in the Big Data lifecycle, and the new Hadoop applier for MySQL. Here is some more reading from Shubhangi, Hadoop applier part 1 and part 2.

MySQL Optimizer
MySQL 5.6 contained a lot of Optimizer enhancements. Here is a blog on subqueries from Øystein, a senior member of the Optimizer team, also aggregated to the MySQL Optimizer blog if you are interested in older posts.

MySQL on Windows
Our focused effort to on MySQL on Windows continues. New this month is the beta of the Connector/Net 6.7.2 which includes support for connecting to the MySQL memcached interface as well as load balancing. If you have not yet tried out MySQL for Excel I encourage you to try the newest version. You can follow the development of MySQL on Windows blog if you are interested.

MySQL General
Please have a look at Mikael’s insights about MySQL Engineering. And read about the fixing of a long standing trigger bug which is also aggregated on the MySQL Runtime blog.

It was with pride I entered the stage at the Percona MySQL Conference yesterday to receive the “Storage Engine of the Year 2013 award” for ndb (the MySQL Cluster storage engine).  Thank you very much, on behalf of myself and the MySQL Cluster engineering team. The team has done a great work over the past 10 years to harden the product, and add new features. MySQL Cluster milestone 7.3.2 was just released. It will be my pleasure to present the “trophy” some members of the team when I get back to Stockholm. Please see a previous post for how the MySQL Cluster journey began for myself and the ndb team 10 years ago.