Just after a day of setting up the  deal with Oracle, Sun Microsystems has released MySQL 5.4, a new version of the popular open source database.

Sun Microsystem Karen Tegan Padir said:

Without any modifications to your applications, MySQL 5.4 will transparently increase the performance and scalability of your applications, to enable them to scale under more demanding user and data processing loads. MySQL 5.4 is also better suited for scale-up deployments on SMP systems.

MySQL 5.4 features are:

  • Scalability improvements — these fixes allow the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers;
  • Subquery optimizations — improves the performance of analytic query operations, with some subqueries;
  • New query algorithms — utilizes main memory to speed up the execution time of multi-way joins, especially for MySQL Cluster;
  • Improved stored procedures — enables more robust error management through the implementation of the SIGNAL/RESIGNAL functions;
  • Improved prepared statements — Output parameters will now be supported in prepared statements, which increases their functionality;
  • Improved Information Schema — provides more metadata access to parameters and data return types that stored procedures use, which allows much more information to be made available for developers using connectors such as ODBC and JDBC;
  • Improved DTrace support — improves diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities for MySQL on Solaris Operating System.

MySQL 5.4 will be available for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris 10 Operating System, Mac OS X.

View complete list of changes here. View feature summary here.

The preview version of MySQL 5.4 is currently available for download at Website for 64-bit versions of the Linux and Solaris 10 Operating Systems.