MySQL 8.1 came out this week, and its support window is measured in months. That is by design. Oracle changed the release model: two tracks now. Innovation releases every quarter or so, 8.1 is the first, short support, new features fast. And an LTS line with years of support, promised for next year. 8.0 stays on bugfixes until its end of life in 2026.
For years the question was “when do we finally move to 8.0”. Now the question has a second dimension: which track are you even on. That is a product decision, and it is worth making explicitly instead of by inertia.
My position is not original. Production follows LTS. A database is the one component where I want other people to find the bugs first. Quarterly majors with short support windows mean quarterly upgrade projects, and nobody budgets for that. An upgrade you are forced into by a support calendar is the worst kind.
But I would not ignore the innovation track completely. If some 8.1+ feature really matters to you, run one test environment on it. You learn the migration pain early, where pain is cheap, and by the time the feature lands in an LTS you already know your schema and your queries survive it.
One trap to write down now: connector and client compatibility. With fast-moving server versions, the version matrix of PDO drivers, ProxySQL and backup tools becomes the real constraint. The server is usually ready before the tooling around it.
PostgreSQL people are smiling, they had a predictable yearly cadence forever. Fair. But two clear tracks are still better than one ambiguous 8.0 that has been “current” for five years.
One project I help with is still on 5.7 and calls 8.0 “the new one”. The calendar will fix our vocabulary before we do.