Saturday, September 8, 2007

MySQL 6.0 in Alpha Test

I just found out that MySQL 6.0 with the Falcon Storage Engine is available as Alpha. Falcon adds ACID compliance, tablespaces and performance improvements. It's supposed to also simplify administration but I'm not sure how MySQL can be simplified. It's pretty simple now. I've always thought that the ability to swap out the storage engine is the best feature of MySQL. It reminds me of the replaceable database drivers from my clipper days in the late 80s and early 90s. From my reading about Falcon, it looks like one advantage will be the fact that Falcon has been engineered to take advantage of 64 bit architectures and large memory caches. User data files in Falcon can be up to 100 terabytes. That should pretty much cover most uses. It looks like you only get a single data file per Falcon database. Falcon has what it calles the Falcon serial Log. It's the equivalent of the Redo Log in Oracle or the Write Ahead Log (WAL) in Postgres/EnterpriseDB. This log file is also used for crash recovery (which I believe is completely automated in MySQL 6.0). Falcon uses 4 different memory caches: log, system and index, page and record. It uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine what data remains when the max is hit. Supposedly this algorithm is faster and more complex that the LRU.

No comments: