Oracle updates MySQL 5.5 for Windows

Oracle has made MySQL 5.5 available for download, with big improvements in Windows integration.

The new release includes massive improvements in Windows performance and compatibility issues, said Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL Development at Oracle, speaking at a press conference.

In comparison with MySQL 5.1, the new release is 550 per cent faster in read only at scale, and read/write performance is up 1560 per cent on a four-socket Intel server running Windows Server 2008.

“These numbers are mind-blowing; it’s not every day you can come out with these kinds of improvements,” Ulin said.

Recovery times were also significantly better he said. System recovery times have been cut more than tenfold and some customers have reported 40x improvements on some systems.

Other improvements in the new release include semi-synchronous replication capabilities, SIGNAL/RESIGNAL support and an InnoDB performance boost, which Ulin said was the result of much closer co-working between the MySQL and the InnoDB software teams, and the decision to make the latter technology the default storage engine for the MySQL database.

MySQL 5.5 has been released under the GPL and would remain totally open source, said Rob Young, senior MySQL product manager at Oracle, but he added that the company would also be offering a commercial version of the software with additional features.

“Everything is free, you can download it right now,” he said.

“The open source community is very important to us, and it’s very important that you hear that.”

He said that the number one complaint from MySQL users was in-storage functionality and the commercial version would include new enterprise backup software that was at least three times as fast as MySQLdump.