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.

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.

InnoDB Improvements
InnoDB is the default storage engine for MySQL. The following feature improvements are in direct response to community and customer feedback and requests.

InnoDB Full-Text Search:
InnoDB full-text search provides users with the ability to build full text indices and search for specific text-based content stored in InnoDB tables. This new functionality supports fast and accurate search on document content using natural language, Boolean, query expansion (wildcard) and proximity search options/algorithms. Learn more:
* Jimmy Yang helps you get started with FTS.
* John Russell's FTS tutorial.
* Jimmy Yang explains the differences between InnoDB and MyISAM FTS.
* Jimmy Yang and Vinay Shukla discuss FTS performance.

InnoDB REDO log files max size increased up to 2 TB
Increases the maximum size of InnoDB REDO log files from 4 GB to 2 TB. Greatly improves the performance of applications with write-heavy workloads or very long running transactions, where the REDO log file limit could be reached.

InnoDB UNDO logs to reside in their own tablespace
Currently InnoDB stores UNDO logs in the InnoDB system tablespace. This enhancement enables users to separate UNDO logs (and associated random IO activity) from the system tablespace (and more sequential IO activity) and to store them on their own tablespace. This also enables users to store UNDO log specific tablespace(s) on Flash or SSDs if desired. Learn more:
* See Sunny Bains' blog for details
InnoDB Buffer Pool options for pre-loading/warming on re-start
New options allow for the preloading or "warming" of the InnoDB buffer pool by providing the capability of dumping and restoring the contents of InnoDB buffer pool(s) to/from disk automatically at shutdown or restart, or manually at any time. The dump process is fast and compact, with minimal storage overhead on the server, as it only stores a list of pages in the bufferpool rather than the contents of the pages. On restart, the restore process reloads page data but runs in the background so normal database operations start quicker and remain unaffected while the bufferpool is reloaded. Learn more:
* See Vasil Dimov's blog for details.
InnoDB .ibd files improved auto-extension
Improves the auto-extension of .ibd files for tables created using the innodb_filte_per_table setting. This setting is used by many useful InnoDB features (compression, off-page storage for BLOBs and large prefix keys for indexes. This enhancement helps reduce the contention on the InnoDB file system mutex when these features are used in configurations with many tables. With this improvement multiple files can be extended in a background process with no contention/locking of other threads doing normal read/write operations. Learn more:
* See Inaam Rana's blog for details.
InnoDB Page Size from 4K to 64K
This feature is a prerequisite for the InnoDB specific optimizations for flash and SSD (coming in a future MySQL 5.6 Labs build). InnoDB now supports smaller 4k and 8k page sizes which result in better performance and longer life span for this type of media. This feature extends InnoDB to support 4K to 64K page sizes in addition to the current 16K default. Learn more:
* See Kevin Lewis's blog for details.
The list above is not exhaustive, so for a complete rundown of all the new InnoDB features see Calvin Sun's InnoDB blog.
Replication Improvements
MySQL Replication is the most popular and widely used way to achieve scalability and high-availability. The following feature improvements are also in direct response to community and customer feedback and requests.

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