Much of the work now under way is going into making the database faster, Ulin said. The InnoDB storage engine and the optimizer have both been revamped for faster performance. The optimizer, for instance, can save its algorithms for a particular query, should the administrator be pleased with the performance of that query under the optimizer.

Schwartz said that this version of MySQL implements some of the performance enhancements his company built into its own version of MySQL, called Percona Server. "This means we won't have to maintain these features any longer," Schwartz said.

One such feature being mulled for inclusion in 5.6 is the ability to "pre-warm the buffer pool cache," Schwartz said. A database can build up a cache of frequently consulted entries. When a server is shut down, however, this cache disappears, and, upon restarting, it can take several hours to build the cache back up. In the meantime, however, users may experience slower-than-normal response from the database.

"This is a big problem with servers with lots of memory," Schwartz said. Pre-warming the cache simply means the database can recreate a cache after it is rebooted. It keeps a list of all the required entries, which it can fetch quickly from the database in an orderly manner.

The company is undertaking quite a bit of work on MySQL's replication capabilities, which automatically copy databases to secondary locations.