Deploy Friday: Your source for everything Open Source

#30: Database Spotlight — MySQL

June 18, 2021 Otavio Santana, Larry Garfield, Platform.sh, Airton Lastori, Dave Stokes Season 1 Episode 30
Deploy Friday: Your source for everything Open Source
#30: Database Spotlight — MySQL
Show Notes

MySQL is an open source, multi-user, and multi-threaded database management system. What’s more, it’s still growing, as our guests, Airton Lastori and Dave Stokes, longtime users of MySQL, emphasize.

We asked Airton and Dave about the newest, most exciting, and lesser-known features of MySQL. They responded enthusiastically. All quotes in this list from Dave Stokes.

  • Recursive CTE:  as Dave explains it, this is “...an easy, painless way to write subqueries. They’re easier to comprehend than standard subqueries too.”
  • Dual passwords: saves and discards secondary passwords, helping you avoid downtime
  • Hash joins: make joins go much more quickly
  • Contention Aware Transaction Scheduler (CATS) : “If you have columns and rows in your data at a certain load level, this automatically switches on and knows how to handle the very hot contention there.”
  • Invisible indexes: “Now, you can make an index invisible to the optimizer, run your explain again, make the index visible again, all without having to go back and rebuild that index.” 
  • Histograms: “A histogram is a bunch of buckets that know where the range of your data is, and the optimizer knows how to get your data much faster.”

And others, including:

  • Materialized columns
  • JSON support
  • Dedicated key value interface

MySQL’s future

While they are huge MySQL fans, Airton and Dave do have some wishes for its future, such as improved replication, analytics, and help for beginners. Dave says, “It’s a steep learning curve to get someone to use a relational database. The more I look at the beginner stuff, we're not doing enough to help people get on their way to becoming database developers.”

MySQL isn’t going anywhere

As an extremely popular database management system, MySQL is embedded in the very fabric of the web, and it’s here to stay. Dave says, “MySQL is used by Booking.com, Ticketmaster, Twitter, Facebook, local YMCAs, big government organizations, and flight operations for the US Navy. MySQL is everywhere.”

Airton adds, “Our job is to make MySQL even easier to use and continue to be reliable. So we try to implement features that customers are looking for, that developers are looking for, and keep the roots for people that are already using MySQL as a database.”

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