Oracle’s MySQL 5.7 has had a good, long run, but the official End of Life is October of 2023. The Era of MySQL 5.x will be over, and only MySQL 8.0 will be officially supported. Yup, six months away. So if you are running MySQL, you need to consider upgrading to version 8.0 N-O-W!!
What does an upgrade provide?
MySQL 8.0 has many really cool features and improvements that are well worth the upgrade. The default character set of UTF8MB4 gives Unicode version 9.0 support. So you get the Umaluts, Cedils, and C-J-K Language support in your data, plus emojis. 8.0 is optimized around this character set. This gives you all the international characters you probably need to support global operations.
The Structured Query Language has been greatly enhanced. If you have trouble writing subqueries, you rejoice in lateral-derived joins and Common Table Expressions (CTEs). There is a new intersect clause to aid with sets.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE is a big boon to query tuning. EXPLAIN without the ANALYZE gives you the server’s estimated analysis of the performance of your query. Adding ANALYZE causes the query to execute, and the numbers returned to report the real numbers of the query’s performance. Add in INVISIBLE INDEXes, and you can test the efficiency of an index without risking a disastrous rebuild after a delete.
There are many other features that you want to have in MySQL 8.0 that you will get in the upgrade. But before going with the MySQL Community Edition, you should look at Percona Server for MySQL.
Why Percona Server for MySQL?
You get all the MySQL 8.0 features that you expect and more. That more is enterprise server features that you would have to pay Oracle extra to obtain.
- ThreadPool enables scaling to 10,000+ connections per server.
- PAM (Plugin Authentication Modules) authenticates MySQL users.
- Vault keyring plug-in, encryption for InnoDB general tablespaces, and encryption for binary log files.
- Audit Plugin enables policy-based monitoring and connection and query activity logging.
- Data Masking to hide, mask, or obscure data like credit cards or identification numbers.
- RocksDB support for disk space saving and performance enhancements.
And Percona Server for MySQL is free. While you are downloading, please look at Percona Xtrabackup for MySQL and the Percona Toolkit. Free from locked-in licenses or commercial upsells, our products are open source, enterprise-ready, and backed by 24/7 support and on-demand services. You’ll always own access to and availability of your data.
Another advantage of Percona Server over Oracle MySQL: extended InnoDB slow log.