From the post:
Just over two years after the release of MySQL 5.5, the developers at Oracle have released a GA (General Availability) version of Oracle MySQL 5.6, labelled MySQL 5.6.10. In MySQL 5.5, the developers replaced the old MyISAM backend and used the transactional InnoDB as the default for database tables. With 5.6, the retrofitting of full-text search capabilities has enabled InnoDB to now take on the position of default storage engine for all purposes.
Accelerating the performance of sub-queries was also a focus of development; they are now run using a process of semi-joins and materialise much faster; this means it should not be necessary to replace subqueries with joins. Many operations that change the data structures, such as ALTER TABLE, are now performed online, which avoids long downtimes. EXPLAIN also gives information about the execution plans of UPDATE, DELETE and INSERT commands. Other optimisations of queries include changes which can eliminate table scans where the query has a small LIMIT value.
MySQL’s row-oriented replication now supports “row image control” which only logs the columns needed to identify and make changes on each row rather than all the columns in the changing row. This could be particularly expensive if the row contained BLOBs, so this change not only saves disk space and other resources but it can also increase performance. “Index Condition Pushdown” is a new optimisation which, when resolving a query, attempts to use indexed fields in the query first, before applying the rest of the WHERE condition.
MySQL 5.6 also introduces a “NoSQL interface” which uses the memcached API to offer applications direct access to the InnoDB storage engine while maintaining compatibility with the relational database engine. That underlying InnoDB engine has also been enhanced with persistent optimisation statistics, multithreaded purging and more system tables and monitoring data available.
Download MySQL 5.6.
I mentioned Oracle earlier today (When Oracle bought MySQL [Humor]) so it’s only fair that I point out their most recent release of MySQL.