Falcon is MySQL's new high-performance transactional engine. The core feature of Falcon is an in-memory multigenerational concurrency control (MVCC) system that gives each reader a view of data that's more consistent that the standard repeatable read, while preventing read/write conflicts. Because the concurrency control is entirely in memory, Falcon avoids the cost of vacuum or garbage collection operations that affect many MVCC systems.

Falcon's concurrency control system differs from others you may know, and the differences will affect some applications. This talk explains which differences you may see, how to work around them, and which defensive programming techniques you may no longer need.