MySQL Enterprise Edition

MySQL Enterprise Edition is a commercial, award-winning, widely used and super fast RDBMS (Relational Database Management System), originally created by Sun Microsystems and now maintained by Oracle. It includes powerful enterprise features, such as MySQL Enterprise Backup, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Enterprise HA, MySQL Enterprise Scalability, MySQL Enterprise Security, MySQL Enterprise Audit, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, MySQL Query Analyzer, MySQL Fabric and MySQL Workbench.

Features at a glance

Key features include support for creating incremental, full or partial backups, point-in-time-recovery functionality, partial or full restores, external authentication support, support for thread pools, policy-based auditing compliance, online “hot” backup support, cluster manager and cluster geo-replication features, automatic scaling, as well as support for various storage engines, including InnoDB, NDB and MyISAM.

Additionally, it features backup compression, database replication, DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) support, Oracle Solaris clustering, Oracle VM templates, Windows failover clustering, Windows Active Directory integration, PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) authentication support, as well as 24/7 support from Oracle. Another interesting features it the ability to make your database infrastructure highly available.

Supported operating systems

MySQL offers great availability, which means that it can be used on a wide range of Linux distributions, including Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle Linux, as well as Sun Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The MySQL Community Editions

In addition to the Enterprise edition of MySQL, the Community edition is freely available for download and it can be easily installed on various Linux-based operating systems using the packages included in the default software repositories of the respective GNU/Linux distribution. It is actively maintained and supported by a community of open source enthusiasts and developers from all places of the world. More details about the MySQL Community Editions can be found on Softoware.

What is new in this release:

• Better Performance and Scalability
• Improved InnoDB storage engine for better transactional throughput
• Improved Optimizer for better query execution times and diagnostics
• Better Application Availability with Online DDL/Schema operations
• Better Developer Agility with NoSQL Access via Memcached API to InnoDB
• Improved Replication for high performance and self-healing cluster deployments
• Improved Performance Schema for better instrumentation and monitoring
• Improved Security for worry-free application deployments
• And other important enhancements

What is new in version 5.6.10:

• New features and enhancements in MySQL 5.6 are available to MySQL users in the MySQL Community Edition.
• MySQL 5.6 provides enhanced linear scalability, helping users to leverage modern hardware capabilities.
• With this version, users can experience simplified query development and faster execution, better transactional throughput and application availability, flexible NoSQL access, improved replication and enhanced instrumentation.
• Better Query Execution Times and Diagnostics provided through an enhanced MySQL Optimizer diagnostics: Subquery Optimizations: simplify query development by optimizing subqueries prior to execution. New efficiencies in how result sets are selected, sorted and returned deliver substantial improvement in query execution times. The Addition of Index Condition Pushdown (ICP) and Batch Key Access (BKA): can improve selected query throughput by up to 280x(1). Enhanced Optimizer Diagnostics: with EXPLAIN for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations. EXPLAIN plan output in JSON format delivers more precise optimizer metrics and better readability, and Optimizer Traces enables to track the optimizer decision-making process.
• Greater Performance Throughput and Application Availability with an improved InnoDB storage engine: Up to 230 Percent Improvement in Transactional and Read Only Throughput: InnoDB has been re-factored to minimize legacy threading, flushing, and purge mutex contentions and bottlenecks, enabling better concurrency on heavily loaded OLTP systems, and resulting in significantly improved throughput for both transactional and read only workloads(2). Enhanced Availability: online DDL operations enable DBAs to add indexes and perform table alterations while the application remains available for updates. Full-Text Search with InnoDB: allows developers to build FULLTEXT indexes on InnoDB tables to represent text-based content and speed up application searches for words and phrases. Simple, Key Value Lookup: flexible NoSQL access to InnoDB provides simple, key-value lookup of InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. Users get the "best of both worlds," combining key-value operations and complex SQL queries in the same database.
• Improved Scale-Out and High Availability: with new features in MySQL replication including: Self-Healing Replication Clusters: the addition of Global Transaction Identifiers and Utilities make it simple to automatically detect and recover from failures. Crash-Safe Replication enables the binary log and slaves to automatically recover correct positions in the replication stream in case of a crash, and resume replication without administrator intervention. Checksums maintain data integrity across the cluster by automatically detecting and alerting on errors. High Performance Replication Clusters: up to 5 times faster replication through Multi-Threaded Slaves(3), Binlog Group Commit and Optimized Row-Based Replication enable users to maximize the performance and efficiency of replication as they scale-out their workloads across commodity systems. Time-delayed Replication: provides protection against operational errors made on the master, for example accidentally dropping tables.
• Enhanced PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA: new instrumentation enables users to better monitor most resource intensive queries, objects, users and applications. New summaries with aggregated statistics grouped by query, thread, user, host and object are also available. The enhancements allow for easier default configuration with less than five percent overhead.
• MySQL 5.6 includes a number of additional enhancements including Geographic Information Systems - Precise Spatial operations, improved IPv6 compliance and optimized server defaults.

What is new in version 5.5.30:

• mysql-libs and mysql-libs-advanced have been removed from the spec file;
• A bit more intelligent processing of .in files in mysql-test/collection has been implemented;
• While converting directory name to filename, a file separator (FN_LIBCHAR) might get appended to the resulting file name. This problem was fixed;
• A pb2 random failure has been repaired;
• The test script which was added with earlier push did not work with embedded case, as there is no pid file created in such cases. "not_embedded.inc" has been added.

What is new in version 5.6.9 RC:

• Functionality Added or Changed:
• Incompatible Change: Replication: A number of variable and other names relating to GTID-based replication have been changed, with a view to making these names more appropriate and meaningful. The old names are no longer supported.
• The features so renamed are shown in the following list:
• The --disable-gtid-unsafe-statements server option has been renamed --enforce-gtid-consistency; the disable_gtid_unsafe_statements system variable has been renamed enforce_gtid_consistency.
• The gtid_done server system variable has been renamed gtid_executed.
• The gtid_lost server system variable has been renamed gtid_purged; in addition, this variable is no longer read-only.
• The SQL_THREAD_WAIT_AFTER_GTIDS() function has been renamed WAIT_UNTIL_SQL_THREAD_AFTER_GTIDS().
• For more information, see Section 16.1.3, "Replication with Global Transaction Identifiers", and Section 16.1.4.5, "Global Transaction ID Options and Variables". (Bug #14775984)
• mysqld now writes dates to the error log in ISO (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss) format. It also includes its process ID following the date. Thanks to Davi Arnaut for the patch. (Bug #56240, Bug #11763523)
• Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and newer support native symlinking using the mklink command. This makes the MySQL Server implementation of database symbolic links using .sym files redundant, so that mechanism is now deprecated and will be removed in a future MySQL release. See Section 8.11.3.1.3, "Using Symbolic Links for Databases on Windows".
• Bugs Fixed:
• Performance: InnoDB: The timing values for low-level InnoDB read operations were adjusted for better performance with fast storage devices, such as SSD. This enhancement primarily affects read operations for BLOB columns in compressed tables. (Bug #13702112, Bug #64258)
• Incompatible Change: The THREAD_ID column in Performance Schema tables was widened from INT to BIGINT to accommodate 64-bit values.
• If you upgrade to this release of MySQL from an earlier version, you must run mysql_upgrade (and restart the server) to incorporate this change to the performance_schema database. (Bug #14664453)
• Incompatible Change: Connection ID (thread ID) values greater than 32 bits can occur on some systems (such as busy or long-running 64-bit systems), causing these problems:
• Connection IDs written to the general query log and slow query log were incorrect. This was true for logging to both files and tables.
• The CONNECTION_ID() function could return a value with a data type too small for values larger than 32 bits.
• The mysql_thread_id() and mysql_kill() C API functions did not handle ID values larger than 32 bits. This could result in killing the wrong thread; for example, if you invoked mysql_kill(mysql_thread_id()).
• Connection IDs now are permitted to be 64-bit values when the server supports them (when built with 64-bit data types), which has these effects:
• Connection IDs are logged correctly to the general query log and slow query log.
• Note
• This change involves a modification to the log tables, so after upgrading to this release, you must run mysql_upgrade and restart the server.
• CONNECTION_ID() returns a data type appropriate for values larger than 32 bits.
• mysql_thread_id() is unchanged; the client/server protocal has only 4 bytes for the ID value. This function returns an incorrect (truncated) value for connection IDs larger than 32 bits and should be avoided.
• mysql_kill() still cannot handle values larger than 32 bits, but to guard against killing the wrong thread now returns an error in these cases:
• If given an ID larger than 32 bits, mysql_kill() returns a CR_INVALID_CONN_HANDLE error.
• After the server's internal thread ID counter reaches a value larger than 32 bits, it returns an ER_DATA_OUT_OF_RANGE error for any mysql_kill() invocation and mysql_kill() fails.
• To avoid problems with mysql_thread_id() and mysql_kill(), do not use them. To get the connection ID, execute a SELECT CONNECTION_ID() query and retrieve the result. To kill a thread, execute a KILL statement.
• (Bug #19806, Bug #11745768, Bug #65715, Bug #14236124, Bug #44728, Bug #11753308)
• Important Change: InnoDB: A DML statement using the index merge access method could lock many rows from the table, even when those rows were not part of the final result set. This fix reduces the excessive locking by releasing the locks of unmatched rows. This optimization affects only transactions with isolation level equal to or less strict than READ COMMITTED; it does not apply to transactions using REPEATABLE READ or SERIALIZABLE isolation level. (Bug #14226171)
• Important Change: Replication: Because running the server with GTIDs enabled prevented changes to nontransactional tables, programs such as mysql_upgrade and mysql_install_db were unable to operate on system tables that used the MyISAM storage engine and therefore could not function correctly. Now, when running with --enforce-gtid-consistency (required whenever --gtid-mode=ON), the server allows single statements on nontransactional tables. (Bug #14722659)
• Important Change: Replication: Formerly, the value of the Seconds_Behind_Master column in the output of SHOW SLAVE STATUS was always set to NULL whenever the SQL thread or the I/O thread was stopped. Now, this column is set to NULL only if the SQL thread is not running, or if the I/O thread is not running following a check to determine whether or not the SQL thread has processed all of the relay log. (If the SQL thread has finished processing and the I/O thread is running, Seconds_Behind_Master is 0.) (Bug #12946333)
• Partitioning: InnoDB: Previously, when attempting to optimize one or more partitions of a partitioned table that used a storage engine that does not support partition-level OPTIMIZE, such as InnoDB, MySQL reported Table does not support optimize, doing recreate + analyze instead, then re-created the entire table, but did not actually analyze it. Now in such cases, the warning message is, Table does not support optimize on partitions. All partitions will be rebuilt and analyzed. In addition, the entire table is analyzed after first being rebuilt. (Bug #11751825)
• InnoDB: If the server crashed while rows were inserted into a table with a FULLTEXT index but before the transaction was committed, an error could occur during the next startup:
• InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread thread_num in file dict0dict.cc line 1019
• (Bug #14826779)
• InnoDB: The server could halt with an error when accessing an InnoDB table containing a FULLTEXT index through the HANDLER statement. (Bug #14788710)
• InnoDB: The server could halt with an error when two kinds of operations happened simultaneously:
• A ROLLBACK of an inserted row that contained off-page columns.
• An online online DDL operation involving a table of ROW_FORMAT=DYNAMIC or ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED (that is, using the Barracuda file format) that rebuilt the table. For example, ADD/DROP COLUMN, ADD PRIMARY KEY, change ROW_FORMAT.
• (Bug #14842014)
• InnoDB: The server could halt with an assertion error for an ANALYZE TABLE operation, depending on the structure of the table and its indexes:
• InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread thread_num in file dict0dict.ic line 447
• InnoDB: Failing assertion: pos < table->n_def
• (Bug #14755452)
• InnoDB: A timeout error could occur on Windows systems when doing ALTER TABLE statements with the DISCARD TABLESPACE or IMPORT TABLESPACE clauses, due to a temporary tablespace file remaining in the file system. (Bug #14776799)
• InnoDB: An online DDL operation for an InnoDB table incorrectly reported an empty value ('') instead of the correct key value when it reported a duplicate key error for a unique index using an index prefix. (Bug #14729221)
• InnoDB: InnoDB tables with FULLTEXT indexes could allocate memory for thread handles that was never released, possibly leading to resource issues on Windows systems. (Bug #14759163)
• InnoDB: During an online DDL operation that copies the table, the secondary index of the table could become corrupted. (Bug #14753701)
• InnoDB: If the server crashed after an online DDL CREATE INDEX operation, an error could occur while rolling back incomplete transactions on the next startup:
• InnoDB: error in sec index entry del undo in
• ...
• InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread thread_num in file row0umod.cc line 559
• (Bug #14707452)
• InnoDB: If the server crashed at a precise moment during an ALTER TABLE operation that rebuilt the clustered index for an InnoDB table, the original table could be inaccessible afterward. An example of such an operation is ALTER TABLE ... ADD PRIMARY KEY The fix preserves the original table if the server halts during this operation. You might still need to rename the .ibd file manually to restore the original table contents: in MySQL 5.6 and higher, rename from #sql-ib$new_table_id.ibd to table_name.ibd within the database directory; prior to MySQL 5.6, the temporary file to rename is table_name#1 or #2. (Bug #14669848)
• InnoDB: This fix improves the error handling when an ALTER TABLE operation adds a column beyond the maximum number allowed for an InnoDB table. It also raises the maximum number of columns for an InnoDB table from 1000 to 1020. (Bug #14705287)
• InnoDB: During an online DDL operation that rebuilt the table, a CHECK TABLE statement could report a count mismatch for all secondary indexes. (Bug #14606472)
• InnoDB: If an ALTER TABLE statement failed while attempting to create a FULLTEXT index for an InnoDB table, the server could halt with an assertion error while dropping the incomplete index. (Bug #14504174)
• InnoDB: During shutdown, with the innodb_purge_threads configuration option set greater than 1, the server could halt prematurely with this error:
• mysqld got signal 11
• A workaround was to increase innodb_log_file_size and set innodb_purge_threads=1. The fix was backported to MySQL 5.5 and 5.1, although those versions do not have the innodb_purge_threads configuration option so the error was unlikely to occur. (Bug #14234028)
• InnoDB: The server could halt with an error under some combinations of concurrent operations:
• InnoDB: unknown error code 20
• This issue originated during the 5.6 development cycle. It affected only transactions using the READ COMMITTED andREAD UNCOMMITTED isolation levels. (Bug #13641662, Bug #12424846)
• Replication: If a table to be replicated had a FULLTEXT index, this index was not ruled out when selecting the type of scan to be used in finding the next row, even though it cannot be used to find the correct one. The row applier subsequently tried unsuccessfully to employ an index scan, causing replication to fail. Now in such cases, indexes which do not provide for sequential access (such as FULLTEXT) are not considered when determining whether to use a table, index, or hash scan for this purpose. (Bug #14843764)
• Replication: When using the GTID-aware master-slave protocol, the slave I/O thread used the wrong position. When using GTIDs, the position is not normally used, but as a special case, the position was used in addition to the GTID when the slave reconnected to the same master (even though this was not necessary). This problem is fixed by making the GTID-aware master-slave protocol not use positions at all any longer. (Bug #14828028)
• Replication: Given a stored routine R in which the GTID_SUBTRACT() function was invoked: Once GTID_SUBTRACT() returned NULL when called inside R, it continued to return NULL every time it was called within R, for the remainder of the client session. (Bug #14838575)
• Replication: MySQL Enterprise Backup, mysqldump, and mysqlhotcopy could not be used with a GTID-enabled MySQL Server, because they were unable to restore the server's GTID state and so could not restore from any point in the binary log other than the very beginning.
• As part of the fix for this problem, the gtid_purged system variable (formerly named gtid_lost) is no longer read-only; now it is possible to add GTIDs to it when gtid_executed (formerly gtid_done) is empty. (Bug #14787808)
• Replication: Restarting replication after the first binary log file was purged resulted in the error Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from binary log: 'The slave is connecting using CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_AUTO_POSITION = 1, but the master has purged binary logs containing GTIDs that the slave requires.' This led GTID-based replication to fail. (Bug #14756691)
• mysql_install_db failed to honor the --user option. (Bug #15866735)
• Creating an InnoDB table with a FULLTEXT index could encounter a serious error if the table name contained non-alphanumeric characters. (Bug #14835178)
• Invalid memory reads could occur for queries that selected from a zero-length table name. (Bug #14780820)
• With LOCK TABLES in effect, CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS ... LIKE could raise an assertion. (Bug #14788976)
• The automatic key generation part of derived table handling did not handle properly columns specified as part of the VALUES() clause and caused an assertion to be raised. (Bug #14786324)
• Attempting to read a utf16 file with LOAD DATA INFILE raised an assertion. (Bug #14786470)
• init_io_cache() used memset() to clear a mutex but passed the wrong mutex size. (Bug #14838882)
• The optimizer could raise an assertion when evaluating a range test against an IS NOT NULL condition. (Bug #14843705)
• An assertion could be raised executing INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE after implicitly starting a READ ONLY transaction in LOCK TABLES mode. (Bug #14788540)
• Attempting to create an auto-increment column in an InnoDB table with a NULL type attribute could cause a serious error. (Bug #14758479)
• An assertion was raised if ALTER TABLE was used to rename a column to same name as an existing column while also reordering the renamed column using AFTER or FIRST. (Bug #14756089)
• An assertion could be raised if semi-join materialization was used to evaluate a NOT IN subquery. (Bug #14751858)
• For some continuation handler nestings, continuation could occur at the wrong location. (Bug #14724836)
• SHOW PROCESSLIST output was not sorted in Id order. (Bug #14771006)
• For some SELECT statements, EXPLAIN could cause the server to exit. (Bug #14761894)
• A memory leak occurred for attempts to use ALTER TABLE to set a default value for a tiny, medium, or long BLOB or TEXT column. (Bug #14756206)
• Installation using Solaris packages ran mysql_install_db during upgrade operations (this should occur only for new installations). (Bug #14747671)
• For UPDATE statements, EXPLAIN showed the total key length in the key_len column rather than the length of the used key parts. (Bug #14682438)
• Starting the server with --bind-address and then setting host_cache_size to 0 could result in the server stopping for certain kinds of client connections. (Bug #14689561)
• With index condition pushdown enabled, the optimizer could produce incorrect results for derived tables. (Bug #14640176)
• The optimizer could incorrectly use a nonspatial index to optimize spatial operations, causing an assertion to be raised. (Bug #14600994)
• mysql_config_editor produced no error message for write errors to the configuration file. (Bug #14545989)
• Query rewriting to scrub passwords for logging was done even if none of the associated logs were enabled. Also, CREATE SERVER and ALTER SERVER are now rewritten as necessary. (Bug #14073554)
• CHECK TABLE and REPAIR TABLE could crash if a MyISAM table had a corrupt key (.MYI) file. Now the server produces an error. (Bug #13556441)
• CHECK TABLE and REPAIR TABLE could crash if a MyISAM table had a corrupt key (.MYI) file. Now the server produces an error. (Bug #13556107, Bug #13556000)
• For dumps of the mysql database, mysqldump skipped the event table unless the --events option was given. To skip this table if that is desired, use the --ignore-table option instead (Bug #55587, Bug #11762933)
• mysqld_safe ignored the value of the UMASK environment variable, leading to behavior different from mysqld with respect to the access mode of created files. Now mysqld_safe (and mysqld_multi) attempt to approximate the same behavior as mysqld. (Bug #57406, Bug #11764559)
• On Mac OS X, reinitializing the query cache could cause the server to exit. Thanks to Davi Arnaut for the patch. (Bug #67156, Bug #14741880)
• For MEMORY tables with HASH indexes, DELETE sometimes failed to delete all applicable rows. (Bug #51763, Bug #11759445)
• The server failed to use the query cache for queries in which a database or table name contained special characters and the table storage engine was InnoDB. (Bug #64821, Bug #13919851)
• On Mac OS X, KILL could sometimes be unreliable. (Bug #37780, Bug #11748945)
• LAST_INSERT_ID(expr) did not work for expr values greater than the largest signed BIGINT value. (Bug #20964, Bug #11745891)