MySQL Server 8.4.0 LTS and 8.0.37 are now available for download and in the MySQL HeatWave Database Service. These are the latest General Availability (GA) releases as of April 30, 2024.
New release model, first LTS Release
In the summer of 2023, MySQL announced plans move to a new LTS and Innovation release model planning a major LTS release every 2 years. For more details see MySQL Releases: Innovation and LTS. Since that announcement 8.0.34+ releases are bug and security fix only. In that same time frame we also released 3 Innovation releases – 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3. These innovation releases were in preparation for the first MySQL LTS release, 8.4.0.
The current releases, 8.0.37 and 8.4.0 come with Premier and Extended Support.
MySQL will continue to maintain a 3 month release cadence
In July/August time frame expect
- Bug and security fix only releases
- MySQL 8.4.1 LTS
- MySQL 8.0.38
- Innovation release
- MySQL 9.0.0 Innovation
MySQL Server 8.4.0 LTS GA includes:
MySQL Server 8.0.37 GA includes:
Advantages of 8.4 LTS Release
- Offers the highest level of stability and the longest length of bug and security patch support.
- No breaking changes – consistent interoperability for your applications and scripts.
- Premier and Extended Support with bug and security fixes – for 8 years.
Advantages of Innovation Releases
- Include many enhancements and new capabilities which will also be included in the next LTS release.
- Designed to enable customers to continuously use leading-edge technologies to rapidly develop or deploy new applications or augment existing applications.
- Innovation releases receive Premier Support up to the LTS release (2 years).
Upgrade Guidance
-
Customers are encouraged to migrate from MySQL 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, or 8.3 to the 8.4 LTS.
MySQL Server 8.4.0 LTS Highlights
General
InnoDB
- Enhancements to Bulk Load
- New “LOAD DATA” – “ALGORITHM=BULK” – higher performance load for sorted and unsorted data.
- Targeted at fast loads of empty tables.
- Support for MySQL Shell multi-file “chunked” data format.
- Optimized using parallelized loads.
- Load ZSTD compressed CSV files.
- LOAD DATA … COMPRESSION = ‘ZSTD’;
- Load progress monitoring.
- View stage, status, and progress.
- For example,
- New “LOAD DATA” – “ALGORITHM=BULK” – higher performance load for sorted and unsorted data.
mysql> SELECT thread_id, event_id, event_name, WORK_ESTIMATED, WORK_COMPLETED FROM performance_schema.events_stages_current;
thread_id event_id event_name WORK_ESTIMATED WORK_COMPLETED
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
49 5 stage/bulk_load_unsorted/sorting 1207551343 583008145
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rollback progress monitoring for large transactions.
- Provided via new error log messages.
- Changed many innodb variables default values.
- Better values for production workloads.
- Clone across patch releases within one LTS.
Optimizer
- Support for auto updates to histograms.
- Up to date histograms result in better query optimization.
- Improves query performance.
Security
- New privilege GRANT … FLUSH_PRIVILEGES
- Finer grained access control to the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command.
- Can avoid usage of the more powerful RELOAD privilege..
- MySQL native password authentication is disabled by default.
- Caching SHA-2 Authentication is now the default.
- Native uses SHA1 Hash – not recommended and is deprecated.
- Native password can be enabled with –mysql-native-password=ON
- MySQL offers multifactor authentication as well as many highly secure authentication options.
Replication
- Group Replication – For single primary – more aggressive pruning of write-sets.
- More resource efficient and improved performace.
- Faster Recovery
- Truncates partially written transactions.
- Improves performance of relay-log recovery.
- Avoids redundant resends.
Router
- Improved method for connection sharing.
- Increases utilization.
- Expose all configuration metadata.
- Allows improved orchestration and observability.
Telemetry
- Standards based observability
- Uses Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) OpenTelemetry
- Works with Cloud Native OpenTelemetry compliant solutions.
- For example, OCI Observability and Management Products
- APM (Application Performance Monitor)
- Metrics Explorer
- Agentless – all within the MySQL Server (mysqld).
- Emits telemetry data using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).
- Simple to enable by defining endpoints and security keys.
- Traces
- Enables full stack monitoring.
- Integrated with all MySQL Connectors.
- Metrics
Other
- Tracking of upgrade and downgrade history
- New file “mysql_upgrade_history”.
- Installation, upgrade and downgrade, details are recorded.
- Includes date, version and release type (LTS or Innovation).
- Lift simple column restriction
- To allow column references as function arguments or part of expressions for correlated scalar subqueries.
- For example:
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE (SELECT func(t2.a) FROM t2 WHERE func(t2.a) = t1.a ) > 0;
SELECT t1.* FROM t1 JOIN ( SELECT func(t2.a) AS a, COUNT(0) AS cnt FROM t2
WHERE (t2.a > 0) GROUP BY func(t2.a)) derived WHERE derived.a = t1.a
AND reject_if(derived.cnt > 1);
- Support query attributes for prepared statements
- MySQL Router Read/Write Splitting
- Simplifies scaling application SQL traffic over a cluster of servers.
- Provides application transparent read/write connectivity for either
- SECONDARY in an InnoDB Cluster
- PRIMARY/SECONARY of REPLICA cluster in an InnoDB ReplicaSet
We have also released the 8.4 versions of MySQL Clients, Tools, and Connectors.
- Regardless of server version, always use the latest version of MySQL Clients, Tools, and Connectors.
- These 8.4 clients, tools, and connectors support both MySQL Server 8.0 and 8.4 LTS.