MySQL 5.6 is out now and that is good news. I have already been using pre-GA versions on some production servers with good success and now that the few wrinkles I have seen have been ironed out, I am sure a lot of people will find the new features in 5.6 well worth waiting for.

However, that does lead to the question of: “what next?”

I still have several things that I would like to see in MySQL in no specific order of preference such as:

• Session transaction state exposed as a variable to allow you to determine if you have started a transaction or not, and thus allowing you to use BEGIN WORK, ROLLBACK or COMMIT as needed.  This information is available via the C API I believe but not via SQL.  Something like @@in_transaction = 1.  Makes modular programming easier.
• Table space management. The default behaviour now in 5.6 is to move to innodb_file_per_table = 1, but really on a large …