2013-08-15 Thursday - Revisiting MySQL

It has been awhile since I last checked-in on new features in MySQL.

I last installed MySQL 5.5 - since then there has been a 5.6 and 5.7 release.

Here are a few selected notes out of the many changes that I found of interest...

5.6 MySQL Release

• MySQL now supports stronger encryption for user account passwords, available through an authentication plugin named sha256_password that implements SHA-256 password hashing
• The EXPLAIN statement now provides execution plan information for DELETE, INSERT, REPLACE, and UPDATE statements. Previously, EXPLAIN provided information only for SELECT statements. In addition, the EXPLAIN statement now can produce output in JSON format.
• Many interesting enhancements to the optimizer...
• Condition handling. MySQL now supports the GET DIAGNOSTICS statement

5.7 MySQL Release

• DDL performance for InnoDB temporary tables is improved through optimization of CREATE TABLE, DROP TABLE, TRUNCATE TABLE, and ALTER TABLE statements.
• InnoDB now supports MySQL supported spatial data types. Prior to this release, InnoDB would store spatial data as binary BLOB data. BLOB remains the underlying data type but spatial data types are now mapped to a new InnoDB internal data type, DATA_GEOMETRY. 
• Condition handling.  MySQL now supports stacked diagnostics areas.
• Optimizer.  EXPLAIN can now be used to obtain the execution plan for an explainable statement executing in a named connection