MySQL 5.7 3x Faster than MySQL 5.6

Magento has the biggest slice from the e-commerce cake and it’s a very cleaver but robust system. Any switch/upgrade can be painful even because these systems are customized strongly. This is why business owners and developers don’t upgrade very slowly. But might be the time is here 🙂

In the last few years we can see a very positive progress around Magento. In the last couple years Magento has a lot of changes. After long years we started to use higher PHP then 5.3 🙂 Right now Magento 2 is out and it’s based on PHP 7 what is the biggest improvement from PHP in the last 12 years. Yes, PHP 7 is really fast!

So I am happy to see MySQL try to catch up. E-commerce world needs faster database servers.
MySQL 5.7 has a significant and really measurable performance improvement. Time is here and have a look on your database server.

Native JSON Support

In MySQL 5.7 a new data type for storing JSON data in MySQL tables has been added. Having a native data type for JSON provides some major benefits:

  • Document Validation – Only valid JSON documents can be stored in a JSON column, so you get automatic validation of your data.
  • Efficient Access – More importantly, when you store a JSON document in a JSON column, it is not stored as a plain text value. Instead, it is stored in an optimized binary format that allows for quicker access to object members and array elements.
  • Performance – Improve your query performance by creating indexes on values within the JSON columns. This can be achieved with “functional indexes” on virtual columns.
  • Convenience – The additional inline syntax for JSON columns makes it very natural to integrate Document queries within your SQL. For example (features.feature is a JSON column):

With MySQL 5.7, you can now seamlessly blend the best of the Relational and Document paradigms in a single tool, using whatever is best for each specific application and use case.

MySQL 5.7 has much more new features and benefits so if you are interested then go and check out these. I wanted to focus on its performance and one of my new feature the JSON here to make it clear how important can be an upgrade now.