MySQL 5.7.2 : Good job Oracle! (Well, almost)

On September 21st, during the opening keynote at MySQL Connect 2013, Tomas Ulin disclosed the release of MySQL 5.7.2. This is a milestone release that includes several new features. Unlike the Previous one, which was just a point of pride, where Oracle was stating its continuous commitment to releasing new versions of MySQL. In MySQL 5.7.2, we see several new features:

• First and foremost, performance. The announcement slides say MySQL 5.7.2 is 95% faster than MySQL 5.6 and 172% faster than MySQL 5.5. I don’t know yet in which circumstances these numbers hold true, but I am sure someone at Percona will soon prove or disprove the claim.
• Performance Schema tables for several aspects:
  • Memory usage
  • Stored programs and Events pre-filtering
  • Replication tables. You can have all the information that you get from SHOW SLAVE STATUS, and then some more, in nicely organized tables. Regrettably, there is no corresponding table or tables for SHOW MASTER STATUS. This is a feature that I did ask for long time ago (7 1/2 years, to be precise) and I had great expectations. Now the feature comes, sort of crippled. Without a table for the contents of SHOW MASTER STATUS, there is no good monitoring system that can be implemented.
• There is now a different method for parallel replication. Instead of splitting the threads by schema, the parallelization can be defined by using a logical clock, which uses information stored by the master, telling the slaves when it is safe to run threads in parallel.
• More flexibility with Semi-synchronous replication
• You can now have more than one trigger per table per each action. The CREATE TRIGGER syntax now include a “trigger_order” clause that allows you to define in which sequence your triggers will run;
• EXPLAIN FOR CONNECTION will let you run an explain statement for an already running query.

There are other news and improvements, and they are all listed in the Release notes, and What’s new in MySQL 5.7. Two minor changes that did not make the news, and yet, they mean a lot for end user experience:

• The Verbosity of the bootstrap which filled the screen (and the error log) with useless trivia that made the users lose track of the real errors, has been greatly reduced. Now you only see warnings and errors. Thank you, MySQL team!
• The test suite now uses InnoDB as default storage engine. This means that a lot of possible errors that could have been overlooked will now be caught by the test suite. Next step will be to use InnoDB for the grant tables, but there does not seem to be a set goal for this.

What else is there? The MySQL Labs now list several experimental features for MySQL 5.7.2. These are features that did not make the cut for the milestone, and are still in a less reliable state. Most notable among them is a build that offers multi source replication. I need to test it more before I can hazard some deeper judgment. For now, I am impressed by the amount of work produced.

Some disappointment comes from the realization that many of the shortcomings found in MySQL 5.6 are still there. SOme of them have been reduced of eliminated by the new performance schema tables, but the bulk of what I noticed in MySQL 5.6 is still there with the same limitations. I will come back to this topic with a deeper analysis of the new features.