MySQL 9.7 Is Out and the Community Wins

Alkin Tezuysal
Director of Services at Altinity Inc.

MySQL 9.7 came out on April 21 and I’ve been going through the release notes so you don’t have to. The short version: Oracle has made several previously Enterprise-only features available in the Community Edition, the Hypergraph Optimizer is now free for everyone, and if you’re still on MySQL 8.0, it has now reached End-of-Life. Like right now. We’ll get to that.

Let’s go through what matters most.

First: MySQL 8.0 had reach End-ofLife

MySQL 8.0.46 shipped alongside 9.7, and it is the last 8.0 release. As of April 2026, 8.0 is officially End-of-Life. No more security patches. No more bug fixes. Oracle’s release notes now encourage users to upgrade to MySQL 8.4 LTS or 9.7.

If you’re on 8.0 in production, you’ve got two paths. MySQL 8.4 LTS is the safest, most conservative upgrade with a well-trodden migration path from 8.0. MySQL 9.7 is if you want all the new stuff, including everything in this post. Either way, the clock has run out on 8.0. It is strongly recommended to plan your upgrade soon.

Some Enterprise features available in Community Edition

This is the headline. Oracle has moved five components from Enterprise Edition into Community Edition with this release. For self-hosted MySQL users, this is genuinely good news.

Four of them are replication components that now ship in Community Edition.

Replication Applier Metrics gives you real visibility into how your replica is processing events. Lag monitoring, throughput, the works. This was always the kind of thing you had to implement separately or access Enterprise Edition.

Group Replication Flow Control Statistics now provides visibility into why your GR cluster is throttling. If you’ve ever stared at a slow cluster and had no idea what was happening under the hood, this one’s for you.

Group Replication Resource Manager lets you control how resources get allocated so replication stops starving your app workloads.

Group Replication Primary Election gives better observability into failover behavior during primary elections, which is exactly when you most need to know what’s going on.

And then there’s the Telemetry component, which is big if you’re running MySQL in a cloud-native setup. Metrics and traces can now flow to Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and whatever else your observability stack includes. This was Enterprise-only until today.

The Hypergraph Optimizer is in Community Edition now

This is the one that stands out as particularly impactful.

Quick background: MySQL’s traditional query optimizer uses a left-deep tree approach to figure out join order. Works fine for simple queries, but with complex multi-table joins it can miss a lot of better execution plans. The Hypergraph Optimizer takes a completely different approach. It models the whole query as a hypergraph and uses dynamic programming to search a much bigger space of possible plans.

If you’ve got complex reporting queries or anything with a lot of joins, it’s worth turning on and seeing what happens.

To try it:

SET optimizer_switch='hypergraph_optimizer=on';

You can set it at session scope (great for testing), globally, persistently across restarts, or hint it on a per-query basis. Start with session scope on your actual slow queries before you go global. The optimizer is solid, but you don’t want surprises in production.

JSON Duality Views finally work properly are now fully supported in Community

Previously, in Community Edition, you could define JSON Duality Views, but couldn’t do INSERTs, UPDATEs, or DELETEs through them. That was an Enterprise thing. This capability is now available in Community Edition.Full DML is now in Community.

They also added auto-increment support for duality view inserts, which means you can stop manually wiring up primary keys:

The order_id gets generated automatically. Small change but it removes a real friction point if you’ve been experimenting with duality views.

A few other things worth knowing

Password hashing got stronger.caching_sha2_password now supports PBKDF2 with SHA-512 storage format. Your existing clients don’t need to change anything since this is server-side only, but it makes stored hashes significantly harder to brute-force. Worth noting if you’re in a compliance-heavy environment like PCI-DSS or HIPAA.

Rolling upgrades just got easier. There’s a new variable called replica_allow_higher_version_source that lets a lower-version replica connect to a higher-version primary. Practically, this means you can upgrade your primary first, verify everything looks good, and then roll through your replicas at your own pace instead of taking the whole fleet down at once.

Container users, this one’s for you. MySQL now correctly reads cpuset cgroup limits to figure out how many CPUs are actually available to it. If you’d constrained MySQL to 4 CPUs in Kubernetes, it might have been sizing its thread pools against all 32 host CPUs anyway. That’s fixed.

OpenSSL got bumped to 3.5.5. Not exciting, but good hygiene.

What about vector search?

A lot of people are asking about this, and the current status is that it is not yet generally available. Oracle is clearly building toward native vector search across the 9.x innovation releases, and you can see pieces of the foundation being put in place. But 9.7 isn’t the release where it lands as something you can use. It’s on the roadmap, it’s coming, the team is looking for feedback and it is expected in the future releases.  As some of you know, I’m especially interested in vector features as a maintainer of the MyVector project. We’ve had a couple of calls with the engineering team to collaborate on this subject. This might be an area for community contributions. Please stay tuned. 

So, should you upgrade?

MySQL 9.7 is available at dev.mysql.com/downloads. If you end up benchmarking the Hypergraph Optimizer or trying the new replication components, share your results. The community learns from real-world numbers a lot more than from release notes. Drop them in the MySQL Community Forums or tag #MySQL97.

About the Author

Alkin Tezuysal is the Director of Services at Altinity Inc. He has extensive experience with open-source relational databases across various sectors and large functions. With over three decades of industry experience, he has led global operations teams for MySQL and ClickHouse customers and users. He’s a known speaker at worldwide open-source database events. His recent achievements extend to open-source communities: He was awarded the Most Influential in Database Community 2022 award by The Redgate 100. He has co-authored the MySQL Cookbook, 4th Edition, 2022, published by O’Reilly Media, Inc. He was awarded the MySQL Rockstar 2023—Oracle (MySQL Community)—and Co-Authored Database Design and Modeling with PostgreSQL and MySQL 2024 by Packt. – Oracle ACE PRO – Oracle 2025. – Oracle Contributor – Oracle 2026

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