Looking to put an end to any lingering concerns about the scalability of its open source database, Oracle today announced the general availability of an update to MySQL that is not only substantially faster, it now supports the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format in a way that may eliminate the need for IT organizations to deploy a separate document database.
Tomas Ulin, vice president of MySQL engineering at Oracle, says version 5.7 of MySQL in benchmark tests run by Oracle reached 1.6 million queries per second. While production application performance will naturally vary by customer, Ulin says MySQL is clearly capable of supporting the performance requirement of the majority of the applications that run in the typical enterprise.
At the same time, Ulin says Oracle is moving to make it simpler for database administers to manage their environments by eliminating the need to deploy a separate database to support applications based on JSON.
Finally, with this release, Oracle is also making available MySQL Router, which makes it simpler to route queries across multiple instances of MySQL, and enhanced data replication capabilities.
While there is no doubt that Oracle is under attack from both rival open source database projects and proponents of NoSQL databases, Ulin notes that not only has Oracle continued to invest in MySQL, the cost of migrating to another database is often prohibitive for most organizations. As such, Oracle envisions that MySQL will continue to be a core element of a database lineup that includes both the Oracle RDBMS and its own NoSQL database for years to come.
The real advantage provided by Oracle, adds Ulin, is not only access to all those databases from a single vendor, but also a common management framework through which to manage them all.