2024 was a productive year for HeatWave MySQL bringing powerful enhancements across the cloud and core database capabilities. From improved availability and disaster recovery to advancements in performance, system management, and operations, we achieved critical milestones that enhance scalability, efficiency, and ease of use. In this blog, we’ll recap some of the most impactful features introduced over the past year.

High Availability and Disaster recovery:

  • HeatWave: Cross-Region DB System Backups:

    • Backups can be copied from one region to another, enhance data durability and disaster recovery capabilities

    • Adhere to data jurisdiction regulations/compliance

    • When a region becomes unavailable, users can use the cross-region backup to restore the HeatWave instance in another region with minimum data loss

    • Cross-Region backups support OCI Identity policies – control data movement between regions

  • Shape change for MySQL HA with HeatWave Cluster:

    • To reduce the service downtime, users can now change the shape of their MySQL HA database system with attached Heatwave Clusters

    • This can be accomplished without terminating and recreating the HeatWave Cluster

Performance Improvements:

  • Hypergraph-based Optimizer for MySQL: 

    • Enables true cost based decisions for a much optimized query plan

    • Improves the performance for complex queries particularly for the ones involving joins without any HINTS

    • For complex queries in industry’s standard benchmark like TPC-H and TPC-DS queries run significantly faster than competition

  • Autopilot Indexing: HeatWave Autopilot Indexing is an ML-based feature designed to help customers to optimize their MySQL database systems for better cost and performance.

    • Users no longer need to manually identify which secondary indexes are most beneficial for their workload

    • Automatically generates secondary index recommendations for creating and dropping indexes based on the current workload

    • Considers both the performance of the queries and the cost of maintaining the indexes

    • Provides index creation time, performance and storage estimations, as well as explanations for the recommendations it generates

  • Bulk Ingest: For customers who want to import a large volumes of data into HeatWave , we added the capability to bulk ingest at the instance creation time.

    • This is done by parallelizing the insertion of the data into the table

    • Ingestion performance improves for both cases where the source data is sorted or unsorted

Key Releases: LTS and Innovation: The MySQL release model is divided into two main tracks: LTS (Long-Term Support) and Innovation.

  • All LTS and Innovation releases include bug and security fixes and are considered production-grade quality.

  • LTS release is a more stable, less fequent release which provides customers with minimal disruption. No feature will be removed or added in subsequent versions

  • Innovation release includes advanced capabilities on cutting-edge technologies for customers  who want to leverage the latest innovations in their applications

  • MySQL 8.4.0 and 8.0.37 LTS support:  MySQL 8.4.0 is the first version of a new Long Term Support (LTS) release based on the MySQL 8.3.0 Innovation release. Stay abreast with latest HeatWave MySQL features with MySQL 8.4.0.

  • The first Innovation release – HeatWave 9.0.0:

    • New features introduced in 9.0.0 are HeatWave GenAI, Autopilot Index Advisor, and JavaScript Stored Programs. 

    • HeatWave version 9.1.2 (Innovation) in the latest innovation release which supports selective load in HeatWave Lakehouse, more efficient memory usage in HeatWave AutoML, and advanced retrieval options for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in HeatWave GenAI

DB Systems Management:

  • Automatic storage expansion: HeatWave Automatic Storage Expansion dynamically adjusts storage capacity to accommodate increasing database workloads

    • Ensuring continuous operation without any downtime

    • Automatically increases the allocated data storage size when the free storage space becomes too low

    • With HeatWave Automatic Storage Expansion, you only need to set a maximum storage limit – the system automatically manages the scaling for you

  • Contact Management: During Planned or unplanned maintenance activities of a Database system, a user can be set to be notified of any system downtime updates.

    • Enhances usability by ensuring that the right individuals are informed promptly

    • Empowers teams to take necessary actions and maintain system reliability

  • Bring your own Certificates: MySQL HeatWave now allows you to use your own security certificates for encrypted connections

    • Simply specify a certificate from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Certificates Service when you create a DB system

    • Automatically rotate the  DB System’s certificates

    • OCI Certificates Service can create, import, and manage all your certificates

Observability & Management for HeatWave MySQL:

  • Monitor HeatWave Clusters in Database Management:  In addition to the existing Database Management functionalities for HeatWave MySQL DB systems, get quick insights into the health, capacity, and performance of your HeatWave Clusters. Notable features are:

    • Monitor the total number of open alarms and the number of alarms by severity for the DB system 

    • Monitor the Health status timeline, which displays an overview of the health status of the HeatWave cluster during the selected period of time

    • Monitor key HeatWave cluster metrics such as Memory (%) and CPU (%)

  • Monitoring with Ops Insights: 

    • ML-based resource usage trending and capacity planning

    • Data Explorer based SQL performance analysis, and dashboard capabilities 

    • Enables DBA to predict consumption for cost control and predict workload (SQL) patterns for performance and scalability improvement

 

For more details on these and other new capabilities, Please review the Oracle documentation release notes

 

Summary:

As the world’s most popular database, The HeatWave product team continues to deliver innovations in availability, performance, operability, and developer productivity for all your business needs. 

There are numerous innovations built into the HeatWave portfolio. We encourage you to try them out and build small-scale applications using the Always Free resources on Oracle Cloud Free Tier.

We look forward to delivering the best in class new capabilities in 2025! Stay tuned!

And as always, thank you for using HeatWave MySQL!