Mysql 5.6 goes GA today, but we will wait for MariaDB to update

MySQL 5.6.10 is the first generally available release of 5.6, meaning it's no longer beta software.  The new release comes many new features like Innodb full-text search, NoSQL Innodb access via memcached api and more.

Innodb full-text search would still be slower performance then using sphinxse in MariaDB.

Oracle states that NoSQL Innodb access is up to 9 times faster for insert statements then using SQL statements.

https://blogs.oracle.com/MySQL/entry/nosql_memcached_api_for_mysql

While that may sound exciting, our web applications are mostly read-only.   This page has charts showing that "get" operations are up to 2 times faster.  That is a much smaller gain for what would require a lot of rewriting to implement and keep in mind that this is only for the most basic ID search queries.  Queries that only grab data via the ID are exceptionally fast already often taking only 1 to 2 milliseconds, so twice as fast is such a small gain in that context.   We are also using CFML for our applications, which has a lot more overhead compared to the direct Java or C API access that Oracle is using in their benchmarks.  We'd need to test the performance on our system to see the actual benefits.

While I love to adopt the newest technology, we need to consider how Oracle has reduced some of the openness in MySQL.   This is causing difficulty for other developers in the MySQL development community who depend on that openness.  They now have to work harder to improve MySQL.    This is unfortunate for the free open source community.

Follow the MariaDB discussion.  To date, Oracle still has made no official statement about why they have implemented internal mysql-test suite.

http://blog.mariadb.org/disappearing-test-cases/

I hope that MariaDB is able to keep innovating and keep the most popular database more open and useful to small businesses like mine.   I'm sure Oracle will also continue to innovate and we may see in the long term that we're forced to use MySQL again if the upstream community has someday been killed off.