The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports version 5.6 of MySQL.
Henceforth available, this new
release brings powerful new features. Therefore the new MySQL 5.6 features include now:
- Crash Safe Read Replicas: MySQL 5.6 improves the reliability of RDS Read Replicas by making the binlog and table data transactionally consistent on the primary database instance. This allows Read Replicas to resume replication automatically after a primary database instance crashes or fails over (in the case of Multi-AZ instances).
- InnoDB Integration with Memcached: this means you can use the Memcached API to bypass the SQL layer and treat InnoDB data as a “key-value” store. You can enable Memcached on your Amazon RDS for MySQL instance using a DB Option Group.
- Binary Log Access: this means you can download and stream binary logs through the native mysqlbinlog tool. This can be useful for a variety of purposes such as syncing data with an on-premises deployment, audit logging, analytics, and debugging of replication errors.
- Online Schema Changes: this means you can now initiate multiple, concurrent ALTER TABLE operations on InnoDB tables to add columns or indexes while simultaneously running queries.
- Full Text Indexes: this means you can build full text indexes (for InnoDB tables) on columns with text based content to speed up searches for words/phrases.
Note: if you would like to port
your existing MySQL 5.5 database to MySQL 5.6, you can use mysqldump to export your database from your existing MySQL 5.5 database instance and
import it into a new MySQL 5.6 database instance.
