This document discusses MySQL 5.6 and its improvements to operational and diagnostic capabilities. Key enhancements include online DDL operations that do not block reads or writes, buffer pool dump and restore for faster startup, import/export of partitioned tables, and transportable tablespaces. Diagnostic tools were improved with EXPLAIN showing more details, the ability to EXPLAIN updates and deletes, optimizer tracing, and the performance schema providing detailed query level instrumentation and monitoring by default.