Last night (24th June) saw the first Dublin based MySQL users meeting, kindly organised and sponsored by Echolibre.

Mark Baker and Ivan Zoratti flew into Dublin to talk about MySQL 5.4 and MySQL Cluster 7.0.

Some brief points from the presentation and discussions.

• MySQL 5.4 (beta) is now available with a GA release planned later this year, possibly in December.
• The performance of the InnoDB engine is much improved and
  can now address more than 4 CPU’s/cores.
• The scalability of the InnoDB engine is much improved as well.
• Improvements has also been made in 5.4 to the performance of subqueries
• MySQL 5.4 now has a replication heartbeat to ensure that
  master/slave setups are working properly
• MySQL Cluster 7.0 is a high availability offering to assure 99.999% availability
• MySQL Cluster 7.0 includes the ability to add nodes to an operating cluster with no downtime
• An online backup utility is also included in 7.0

I found the presentation and discussions very informative and hopefully this is the start of a series of MySQL events in Dublin going into the future.