Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) announced MySQL(TM) 5.4, a new version of the world's most popular open source database, designed to deliver significant performance and scalability improvements to MySQL applications. A preview version of MySQL 5.4 is available now for download at http://www.mysql.com/5.4.

Today's announcement was made at the seventh annual MySQL Conference & Expo (http://www.mysqlconf.com) being held this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. With more than 2,000 attendees, it is the world's largest event for open source database developers, DBAs, vendors and corporate IT managers.

MySQL 5.4 includes performance and scalability improvements enabling the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers. MySQL 5.4 also includes new subquery optimizations and JOIN improvements, resulting in 90% better response times for certain queries*. These performance and scalability gains are transparent and don't require any additional application or SQL coding to take advantage of them.

In the conference's opening keynote, Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of Sun's MySQL and Software Infrastructure Group, addressed the MySQL community, “Without any modifications to your applications, MySQL 5.4 will transparently increase the performance and scalability of your applications, to enable them to scale under more demanding user and data processing loads. MySQL 5.4 is also better suited for scale-up deployments on SMP systems. Please download today's preview version and send us your feedback – we want this to be the fastest, highest-quality release of MySQL ever.”

"Our initial tests of MySQL 5.4 show our application performance is up to 40% faster right out-of-the-box," said Phil Hildebrand, manager of Database & Deployments at thePlatform (www.theplatform.com). "We'll continue to follow this release closely for additional improvements."

MySQL 5.4 Features & Benefits

A number of new enterprise features and compelling fixes are planned for MySQL 5.4, including:

• Scalability improvements -- these fixes allow the InnoDB storage engine to scale up to 16-way x86 servers and 64-way CMT servers, more than doubling its previous capability;
• Subquery optimizations -- improves the performance of analytic query operations, with some subqueries now executing in a fraction of the time compared to previous MySQL versions;
• New query algorithms -- utilizes main memory to speed up the execution time of multi-way joins, especially for MySQL Cluster because the number of round-trips between the server and cluster nodes is minimized;
• Improved stored procedures -- enables more robust error management through the implementation of the SIGNAL/RESIGNAL functions, so applications can more easily rely on stored procedures for business logic;
• Improved prepared statements -- Output parameters will now be supported in prepared statements, which increases their functionality;
• Improved Information Schema -- provides more metadata access to parameters and data return types that stored procedures use, which allows much more information to be made available for developers using connectors such as ODBC and JDBC;
• Improved DTrace support -- improves diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities for MySQL on the Solaris(TM) Operating System.

Supported Platforms & Availability

MySQL 5.4 will be generally available for a wide variety of hardware and software platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris 10 Operating System, Mac OS X, Free BSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, IBM i5/OS and other popular Linux distributions.

The preview version of MySQL 5.4 is currently available for download at http://www.mysql.com/5.4 for 64-bit versions of the Linux and Solaris 10 Operating Systems. Based on community feedback, an estimated release date for the GA version will be announced later this year.

About Sun's MySQL Database

MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with commercial subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.

About Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer"(TM) -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com

*See http://www.mysql.com/benchmarks

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, MySQL, Solaris, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.