You'll need 5.7 to make full use of JSON features; ditto for geo. MySQL 5.7 is still considered pretty new (GA for ~9 months) so many companies haven't upgraded

You'll need 5.7 to make full use of JSON features; ditto for geo. MySQL 5.7 is still considered pretty new (GA for ~9 months) so many companies haven't upgraded yet. Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL do offer 5.7 though, if you want to try out these features. Best MySQL resources are generally the manual [0],[1] and Percona's blog [2],[3] As for MySQL table schema best practices, definitely a broader topic, but yes it tends to differ greatly from what's taught academically. Baron's book [4] is probably the best starting place -- it's a few versions old by this point, but most of the core recommendations around InnoDB tables and indexing in there still apply. [0] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/spatial-extensions.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/spatial-extensions.ht... [1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/json.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/json.html [2] https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/02/03/new-gis-features-in-mysql-5-7/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/02/03/new-gis-features-in-... [3] https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/03/07/json-document-fast-lookup-with-mysql-5-7/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/03/07/json-document-fast-l... [4] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022343.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022343.do