Indicating its continued investment in MySQL, Oracle from Monday onwards is providing early access to MySQL 5.6 features to its developer community to test, deploy and provide feedback. This latest release of the popular open source database product provides better scalability, performance and flexibility. MySQL 5.6 early access features are available for download here.

New and enhanced features include InnoDB Full-Text Search, InnoDB Buffer Pool Pre-loading Options, Larger InnoDB Redo Log Files, Binlog Group Commit and the Binlog API. InnoDB storage engine provides support for full text search, superior performance for write-intensive applications and better scalability. Developers now have the option to increase the maximum size of InnoDB redoes log files from 4 GB to 2 TB through its Larger InnoDB Redo Log Files feature option.

Some other new features include the ability for users to build full text indices and search for text-based content stored in InnoDB tables, new manual and automated options to preload and reduces the preparation times after server re-start, improved performance of MySQL replication, integration of MySQL with both new and legacy applications and data stores and improved fast and accurate search on document content.

All these features are still in the development stage, and Oracle plans to gather feedback and suggestions from its community users to move this forward into future development and general availability releases.

“Oracle continues to advance MySQL to address the evolving needs of application developers,” said Tomas Ulin, Oracle’s MySQL vice president of Engineering. “This MySQL 5.6 early access release provides a preview of many important features that deliver enhanced performance, flexibility and scalability, and gives the MySQL community an opportunity to provide feedback to Oracle.”

In fact, Oracle has released a first development milestone of MySQL in April this year, with the previous version of MySQL, version 5.5, coming out in December of last year. Oracle is now controlling the development MySQL after its acquisition of Sun Microsystem, lending to a whole new set of areas to explore in the open source cloud, and in the courtroom.

The full MySQL 5.6 release would provide Oracle to deliver superior performance and scalability for applications running on cloud systems. Vendors such as Xeround recently announced its cloud service application to support the MySQL database. Oracle, through its Sun servers and applications, is expanding its products in cloud solutions. They unveiled a new cloud infrastructure offering that runs on virtualized Sun servers and Oracle software. MySQL also provides DataStream, the open cloud service, to control data policies.