We are excited to announce MySQL 5.6 support for Amazon RDS. Starting today, you can launch new RDS database instances running MySQL 5.6 with just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console. Amazon RDS for MySQL delivers several important benefits to MySQL customers including ease of deployment, high availability with automatic failure detection and failover, read replicas, push button scalability, automated back-ups, point-in-time restore and automated software upgrades and patching.

New features in MySQL 5.6

With the push button deployment provided by Amazon RDS, you can now easily take advantage of several new MySQL 5.6 features including a few highlighted below:

Crash safe slaves (Read Replicas) : MySQL 5.6 enables Read Replicas to be more crash safe by making the binlog and table data transactionally consistent, so that Read Replicas can resume replication automatically after a master database instance crashes or fails over (in the case of Multi-AZ instances).

: MySQL 5.6 enables Read Replicas to be more crash safe by making the binlog and table data transactionally consistent, so that Read Replicas can resume replication automatically after a master database instance crashes or fails over (in the case of Multi-AZ instances). InnoDB integration with Memcached: With MySQL 5.6, you can use the Memcached API to interact with InnoDB data directly as a "key-value" store and bypass the SQL layer in the process. You can enable Memcached on your Amazon RDS for MySQL instance via the DB Option Group functionality.

With MySQL 5.6, you can use the Memcached API to interact with InnoDB data directly as a "key-value" store and bypass the SQL layer in the process. You can enable Memcached on your Amazon RDS for MySQL instance via the DB Option Group functionality. Binary Log access: MySQL 5.6 allows downloading and streaming binary logs through the native mysqlbinlog tool. This can be useful for a variety of purposes such as synching data with an on-premises deployment, audit logging, analytics, and debugging of replication errors. In order to take advantage of this feature, the RDS database instance must have backup retention enabled. Review the "Accessing MySQL 5.6 Binary Logs" section of the User Guide to learn more.

MySQL 5.6 allows downloading and streaming binary logs through the native mysqlbinlog tool. This can be useful for a variety of purposes such as synching data with an on-premises deployment, audit logging, analytics, and debugging of replication errors. In order to take advantage of this feature, the RDS database instance must have backup retention enabled. Review the "Accessing MySQL 5.6 Binary Logs" section of the User Guide to learn more. Online schema changes: This is one of the most awaited features of MySQL 5.6 and enables you to perform several "ALTER TABLE" operations (for InnoDB tables) such as adding a column or an index in-place while allowing queries on the table concurrently.

This is one of the most awaited features of MySQL 5.6 and enables you to perform several "ALTER TABLE" operations (for InnoDB tables) such as adding a column or an index in-place while allowing queries on the table concurrently. Full Text Indexes: With MySQL 5.6, you can build full text indexes (for InnoDB tables) on columns with text based content to speed up searches for words/phrases.

Launch new MySQL 5.6 instances now

To create a new MySQL 5.6 database instance, just use the "Launch DB Instance Wizard" in the AWS Management Console and select the DB Engine Version 5.6.12.

Learn more by visiting the MySQL section of the Amazon RDS User Guide and the release notes for MySQL 5.6.