Operations

Major means breakage possible, minor means safe. For twenty years a MySQL version number carried that promise, and you could plan by reading it. With the move to calendar-style releases the number tells you one thing: when it was built. The promise moved elsewhere, and you have to know where to look. The signals now are the channel and the dates. Is this an LTS or an innovation release. When does support end. What do the compatibility notes actually say, because “no major version” does not mean “no behavior change”. Optimizer changes ship in any release. Your query plans do not read version numbers. ...

Half the industry is sitting on MySQL 5.7 right now, unsupported since last autumn, and calling it stability. MySQL 8.4 came out today, and the important word in the announcement is not a feature. It is LTS. First long-term release of the new model: innovation releases every quarter for the brave, an LTS every couple of years for production, bugfixes only after that. People underestimate how much pain the old model caused. 8.0 was a rolling target. A “minor” 8.0.x could change optimizer behavior or deprecate something you used. Staying current meant re-testing, staying behind meant missing security fixes. ...