Oracle recently released MySQL 8.0.36 and MySQL 8.3, and this is a perusal of the release notes to determine what is new, what is in the seventy-three bugs fixed, and what has changed in the three months since the last releases. Comments in italics are my own and do not reflect the view of anyone else or my employer.
The TL;DR for the impatient is this: 8.0.36 is full of bug fixes but no new goodies. The 8.3 release is the first of this new line to provide hints of what architecture is on the horizon. My suggestion is to read through the ‘36 release notes at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/8.0/en/news-8-0-36.html but not to upgrade unless you find one of the bug fixes listed is severely impacting you. Better yet, wait a few weeks for the Percona engineers to add the enterprise features for the Percona Release 8.0.36. And 8.3 is for tinkerers wanting the bleeding edge code and promise not to use it for nefarious reasons or production.
MySQL 8.0.36
Those who compile their MySQL software will be happy to know the GnuPG build key has been updated, as the previous key had expired. You may have to manually reinstall the MySQL APT or YUM repository setup package from https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/. Or, download the MySQL GnuPG public key and add it to your system’s GPG keyring.
Performance schema fans will discover that it caused some unnecessary overhead. All stored procedure micro instructions (statement/sp/%), except statement/sp/stmt, are disabled by default. I am not sure how much this will impact normal use, but having it turned off by default implies it was more than some would find acceptable.
OpenSSL is now version 3.0.12.
MySQL 8.3
There is a nutshell for 8.3 at https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.3/en/mysql-nutshell.html.
Downgrading from MySQL 8.3 to MySQL 8.2 is not supported. SO, back up before upgrading to 8.3 in case you need to back down. Remember, this is not a ‘for production’ release, and neither is 8.2.
The format of global transaction identifiers, or GTIDs, used in MySQL replication and group replication has been extended to enable the identification of groups of transactions, making it possible to assign a unique name to the GTIDs that belong to a specific group of transactions. Batch processing has its benefits.
IGNORE_SERVER_IDS is not compatible with GTID mode. See notes for a workaround.
There are now TWO versions of JSON output for EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON. The new, non-default option of 2 provides access path information that will be fed to the optimizer in a future release. Could we be in for some machine learning to make our queries faster, hmmmm?
Deprecations include C API calls, the FLUSH HOSTS statement, and obsolete replication variables & options.
Dependency tracking with writeset information can cause problems. If you use binlog_transaction_dependency_tracking set to WRITESET or WRITESET_SESSION, binlog_format must be ROW. And MIXED is no longer supported in such cases.
Conclusion
MySQL 8.0.36 and 8.3 are here but do not give any new gee-whiz features. Now, incremental clean-ups and bug fixes are admirable, if not exciting. Oracle promises MySQL 8.0.37 and 8.4 for April, and there may be some excitement then. These two releases delivered this week are good, solid work but nothing to make an average database maintainer want to want to run the new code immediately.
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