What’s New in MySQL InnoDB 5.7? Performance Boosts and Fresh Features

This article compiles a presentation from the “Efficient Operations” series, featuring Allen Lai, Principle Software Developer on Oracle’s InnoDB team, who has over a decade of experience in database engine development.

Key Performance Improvements

1.1 Transaction‑related Optimizations

In MySQL 5.7 a transaction pool is introduced, defaulting all transactions to read‑only until a write operation occurs, reducing creation and release overhead. Transaction lifecycle management is refined so transactions start as read‑only and become read‑write only when a write begins, and transaction priority handling is adjusted.

Benchmarks show read‑only transactions achieve more than double the throughput of 5.6, while read‑write transactions see roughly a 50% speedup.

1.2 Temporary‑Table Optimizations

Temporary tables are moved out of the data dictionary, receiving separate tablespaces to avoid lock contention and reduce I/O. Only undo logs are written for temporary‑table DML, eliminating redo logging and cutting log overhead.

Performance tests demonstrate over 2× faster CREATE/DROP of temporary tables, more than 2× faster insertion of 5 million rows, and 75%‑40% reductions in delete and update costs.

1.3 Other Performance Optimizations

Buffer pool improvements address scaling on high‑core machines, and buffer flushing to disk now supports multithreading. The InnoDB Memcached plugin benefits from read‑only transaction optimizations, reaching up to 1.1 M QPS for small, frequent read workloads. DDL operations, especially ALTER TABLE index creation, are accelerated by batch processing, yielding about 170% faster index builds.

New Features in InnoDB 5.7

2.1 Native Partitioning

InnoDB now supports native table partitioning, reducing memory usage by up to 90% for multiple instances and enabling import/export of individual partitions.

2.2 Tablespace Management

The new tablespace management offers a more familiar workflow without adding functional changes.

2.3 Dynamic Buffer Adjustment

Buffer pool size can be changed at runtime without restarting the server.

2.4 Automatic Log Truncation

Log files are automatically truncated, preventing uncontrolled growth.

2.5 Larger Data Pages

Support for 32 KB and 64 KB pages allows larger BLOBs to be stored directly in pages, improving access speed.

2.6 GIS Support

InnoDB now includes an R‑tree based spatial index for efficient geographic queries.

2.7 Virtual Columns and Indexes

Virtual columns can be defined and indexed; their values are computed on‑the‑fly rather than stored.

2.8 New Data Compression Method

Page‑level compression using file‑system punch‑hole techniques reduces file size and improves I/O efficiency.

2.9 Additional Features

Support for the GB18030 character set, enhanced full‑text indexing, atomic writes on NVMFS, and other improvements are also included.