Oracle Collaborate Round-up 2011: MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release

By David Roe (@druadh20) Apr 12, 2011

It's Collaborate time again. Not enterprise collaborate as we normally know it, but Oracle’s Collaborate conference, where we get a look at some of the things it has been working on since Open World last September. In today’s round-up there is the first MySQL 5.6 milestone release, new monitoring capabilities for Enterprise Manager 11g and a couple of other releases worth noting.

First MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release

Without making too much of previous Larry Ellison comments about the cloud, Oracle has announced at the Collaborate conference, the first MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which it is describing as a milestone release. It includes some tweaking done to MySQL to make access to big datasets quicker, which in the current climate can only mean one thing — cloud computing.

With cloud computing in mind it comes with an upgraded InnoDB storage engine and better capabilities for replication, which it has invited the MySQL community to test over the course of the current development, with a number of other milestones foreseen in the future, all of which will have new features.

As well as being offered the chance to test the new features in this release, the community will also be able to test significant new features such as NoSQL access to InnoDB via the Memcached protocol.
According to Oracle, as well as enhanced replication and improved InnoDB storage engine, with this release MySQL now has:

Faster performance and scalability
Better query performance through an improved optimizer
Faster access to relevant data as a result of more portioning options
New Monitoring Abilities for Enterprise Manager 11g.

MySQL offers an alternative to Microsoft’s SQL Server, and its code is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Enterprise Manager 11g Monitoring

It wouldn’t really be a Collaborate conference without something from Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and sure enough on the very first day, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Real User Experience Insight.

This new product integrates Oracle Real User Experience Insight and Oracle’s Business Transaction Management capabilities that were recently added to Enterprise Manager 11g.

It delivers improved usability through externally viewable dashboards, simplified user session search, easier administration and enhanced enterprise readiness.

With it, both business users and IT departments can track user interaction with and across applications from the time a business transaction is initiated to the time it is finished.

Again, with this release Oracle has spent a lot of time focusing on performance issues and has tweaked the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) alert window from five minutes to one minute.

The enhancements are an integral part of Oracle Application Management Suites for Oracle’s Siebel CRM, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise, the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

PeopleSoft Financials 9.1 Feature Pack

Oracle has also been looking at productivity and compliance and has released PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials and Supply Chain Management (FSCM) 9.1 Feature Pack 2011.

The company says that this is the most significant release of PeopleSoft in the past ten years and comes with a new installation version and additional support for those who are upgrading to the new version.

In fact, there appears to be a number of new upgrades on the way as Oracle says it intends to deliver Feature Packs on a regular basis between major releases.