The new MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release (DMR) introduces a much anticipated feature - Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) for MySQL replication. GTIDs make it simple to track and compare replication progress between the master and slave servers. This enables much simpler recovery from failures of the master, while also introducing great flexibility in the provisioning and on-going management of multi-tier or ring (circular) replication topologies.

Oracle is delighted to announce the immediate availability of the production-ready, GA release of MySQL Cluster 7.2, available for download under the GPL, and as part of the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, including management tools, product certifications and 24x7 global support. New benchmarks demonstrate MySQL Cluster's ability to support the most demanding web and telecoms workloads, while maintaining 99.999% availability. MySQL Cluster delivered 1 billion queries per minute (17.6 million queries per second), scaled-out across 8 x commodity Intel x86 server nodes, accessed by the NoSQL C++ NDB API.

Oracle recently provided access to many new MySQL 5.6 features through http://labs.mysql.com for the user community to test and comment on. One notable feature is the InnoDB Full-Text Search (FTS) engine. It lets users build FULLTEXT indexes on InnoDB tables to represent text-based content and speed up searches for words and phrases.

MySQL Cluster is one of the fastest growing technologies available from MySQL today. To build on this momentum, we are announcing the second Development Milestone Release (DMR) at Oracle Open World 2011. The MySQL Cluster 7.2.1 builds upon the first DMR (7.2.0) announced in April 2011 with a range of new capabilities designed to enable next generation web services, enhance cross data center scalability and simplify provisioning.

MySQL 5.5 has been widely acknowledged to be the best release in the history of MySQL. And, in April 2011, we raised the bar again with Development Milestone Release (DMR) and Early Access (Labs) releases of MySQL 5.6. John Russell did an excellent job of summarizing the features in the "What's New in 5.6" devzone article he posted in April. At OSCON 2011, we are delivering more early access (labs) features for InnoDB and Replication features. These features are focused on better scalability, performance and flexibility. We look forward to community testing and feedback.

We interviewed Alexander "Bar" Barkov to discuss the recent improvements in MySQL globalization that enable MySQL users around the world to use the database system more easily and naturally.

We talked to Georgi "Joro" Kodinov to discuss the MySQL 5.5 Pluggable Authentication API which enables MySQL to access external authentication sources.

With MySQL 5.5 generally available and being deployed all over the planet, the architects and strategists can start looking ahead to the exciting new thing with "SQL" in its name: MySQL 5.6. MySQL 5.6 builds on the momentum of 5.5, and Oracle's investment and commitment to MySQL, by delivering better performance and scalability.

The announcements at the Oracle Collaborate and O’Reilly MySQL conferences mark an exciting milestone in the development of the MySQL Cluster database. MySQL Cluster is already proven as a write-scalable, real-time transactional database, combining 99.999% availability with the low TCO of open source. With a distributed, multi-master architecture and no single point of failure, MySQL Cluster scales horizontally on commodity hardware to serve read and write intensive workloads. With these enhancements announced in the Development Milestone Release, MySQL Cluster can be extended to serve a broader range of workloads.

The ever increasing performance demands of web-based services has generated significant interest in providing NoSQL access methods to MySQL - enabling users to maintain all of the advantages of their existing relational database infrastructure, while providing blazing fast performance for simple queries, using an API to complement regular SQL access to their data. The HandlerSocket development at DeNA is a great example of community innovation, with a solution implemented as a custom plug-in and protocol for the MySQL server daemon. We are hearing the community say they want NotOnly SQL - they want their trusted SQL RDBMS - plus, they want NoSQL techniques to access that data. So, we are previewing our NotOnlySQL solution for MySQL - delivered via memcached - with implementations to access both the InnoDB and MySQL Cluster (NDB) storage engines.