Amazon RDS Update – Support for MySQL 5.7

You can now launch Amazon RDS database instances that run MySQL 5.7 .

This release of MySQL offers a number of performance, scalability, and security enhancements. Here are some of the most important and relevant ones:

• Native support for JSON data and a set of built-in JSON functions (JSON_ARRAY, JSON_OBJECT, JSON_QUOTE, JSON_CONTAINS, JSON_CONTAINS_PATH, JSON_EXTRACT, JSON_KEYS, JSON_SEARCH, JSON_APPEND, JSON_ARRAY_APPEND, JSON_ARRAY_INSERT, JSON_INSERT, JSON_MERGE, JSON_REMOVE, JSON_REPLACE, JSON_SET, JSON_UNQUOTE, JSON_DEPTH, JSON_LENGTH, JSON_TYPE, and JSON_VALID).
• A Performance Schema that provides access to new and improved performance metrics.
• Optimizer improvements for better parsing, EXPLAINing, and querying.
• GIS with native InnoDB spatial indexes and integration with Boost.Geometry (read MySQL 5.7 and GIS, an Example and Making Use of Boost Geometry in MySQL GIS to learn more).
• Improved parallel replication using a new logical clock mode (read Multi-threaded Replication Performance in MySQL 5.7 to learn more).
• Improved InnoDB scalability and temporary table performance. Improved tablespace discovery during crash recovery, and dynamic buffer pool resizing.

Read the MySQL 5.7 Release Notes for more information!

Launching a Database Instance
As always, you can launch these instances from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, the RDS API (CreateDBInstance), or via a CloudFormation template. Here’s how you launch a database instance from the Console:

After I launched my instance, I edited its security group to include the public IP address of one of my EC2 instances. Then I connected with it in the usual way:

Then I took a quick look at the new Performance Schema:

Time was kind of tight and my MySQL is kind of rusty so I didn’t have a chance to exercise any of the new features. I’ll leave that up to you!

Available Now
Amazon RDS for MySQL is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), China (Beijing), South America (São Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

— Jeff;

PS – Many of you have asked about an in-place upgrade from version 5.6 to version 5.7. I checked with the development team and they confirmed that this is in the works. They did want to make version 5.7 available as quickly as possible, and recommended two upgrade options that you can use now: dump and reload, or read replicas.