Christmas are coming, most of us will be at home, spending some time with their families. Everybody looks forward to it. Everybody is stressed at least a month before to get everything ready and then you are at home, with your family and it’s great. For few days. Then, let’s say it starts to be too much of quality time spent together. Luckily, there are Christmas presents to help you. Something you can play with. But if you run out of them and you are interested in MySQL, I’ve got two new packages for you in server:database repository. And as we are speaking about having some fun, these two updates are the latest development versions of two most widely used MySQL variants (at least according to my little survey). You can get MariaDB 5.3.3 which is currently in rc state or MySQL 5.6.4 which is also in development state. I tried both and both works (haven’t lost any data during migration), but I run into some troubles with switching from MariaDB to MySQL. So my blog is currently running MariaDB 5.3.3 but I will migrate it to MySQL 5.6.4 as soon as I resolve the migration problems. What’s new and why should you be interested in trying new versions? Let’s see…
MariaDB 5.3
According to the MariaDB website, the focus of MariaDB 5.3 is to improve performance for subqueries and joins/single-table queries over large data sets. Patches were partially taken from various MySQL versions (including never released MySQL 6.0 which is getting released piece by piece in 5.X series) and written by MariaDB team. If you are interested in more details, see official page. Also one of the new features I saw somebody praising a lot was adding microseconds as a part of time data types. So if you are interested in these stuff, here you go 😉 Of course, that isn’t all, but these few
MySQL 5.6
Now let’s take a look at main MySQL 5.6 features. You probably noticed that starting version 5.5 InnoDB is the default storage engine for MySQL. So version 5.6 contains many improvement to this particular engine. Improvements affects not only performance, but also provides more informations for database administrator. 5.6 series also include some query optimizer improvements and what’s new in memcached NoSQL interface to the InnoDB if you need even more performance. This interface is also included in 7.2 version of MySQL cluster where it is included for ndbcluster storage engine (and we have MySQL Cluster 7.2 in our server:database repository as well, if you will get more computers as Christmas present 😉 )
MySQL 5.6 is also the variant I run into a little trouble while trying it. Trouble was I was trying it on my existing data from MariaDB (kids, don’t try it at home, never ever update production environment without prior testing and always do backups anyway). It didn’t startup complaining about slaves. I don’t have any. But as usual in case of any error, log was pretty clear about what should I do to get my database back running. It just needed one extra option (skip-slave-start) in configuration and it was running again. But it wasn’t able to access all my data. Looks like moving constantly between MariaDB, MySQL and their development version made some changes that new MySQL couldn’t bear with. I will take a deeper look into that, might be that I was just missing something while running mysql_upgrade. Maybe I broke something somewhere else. I’ll see and will let you know 😉
So if you want to play with MySQL, you’ve got some new things to try and play with 😉
PS: Merry Christmas!!!