Last week, we published MySQL Early Access Release builds available for community testing and feedback ahead of the upcoming stable releases. Early Access builds are ideal for developers and DBAs who want to validate compatibility, behavior, and performance in non-production environments—and help us catch regressions early or identify areas where the documentation could be clearer. We added build options last week to include:
As we ramp up to the next MySQL Community Edition releases in April, the first Early Access build for MySQL 9.7 is now available for testing. Please download and try the Early Access Release builds and provide feedback.
How to try Early Access Release Builds
We recommend testing in an isolated non-production environment (local setup, CI pipelines, or a staging environment), ideally using representative queries and realistic data volumes. Focus on the areas that are most critical for your use case, such as:
- Upgrade and rollback testing
- Replication and high availability behaviors
- Performance for your key workloads and query patterns
- Security configuration and authentication behavior
- Compatibility with clients, connectors, and drivers
When sharing results, we’re especially interested in regressions, upgrade issues, performance changes, and replication/HA edge cases observed with Early Access builds.
How to share feedback
If you run into an issue or have suggestions, please share:
- The exact build/version identifier (when available)
- Your platform/OS and deployment details
- Clear steps to reproduce (or a minimal reproducible test case)
- Relevant logs and error messages (and stack traces where applicable)
If you can, please include whether the issue is new vs. a prior release (and which version you compared against), plus any configuration details that might influence behavior (e.g., replication topology, Group Replication settings, workload characteristics).
Please file actionable bug reports via the MySQL Bug System: https://bugs.mysql.com/
(Include clear reproduction steps and environment details to help speed triage.)
Providing these details helps us triage faster and improves the turnaround time for fixes.
What’s new in this Early Access release build
We’ll add a short “What’s New” summary and link to the official release notes as soon as they are published:
- Build/version: MySQL 9.7 Early Access (EA) Release build (see the download page for the current build identifier)
- Download / getting started: MySQL Labs (Early Access builds): https://labs.mysql.com/
- Highlights:
- Flow-control monitoring for MySQL InnoDB Cluster (Group Replication)
- Multi-threaded applier: extended applier statistics
- Automatic Eviction & Rejoin
- Up-to-date Aware Primary Election
- Telemetry (OpenTelemetry / OTLP)
- Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO)
- MySQL JSON Duality Views
- Hypergraph Optimizer
For guidance on how to engage with the MySQL community—and how to provide feedback on Early Access builds—see the MySQL Community Developer Guide
Thank you to everyone in the MySQL community who tests Early Access builds and shares feedback—this is one of the fastest ways to improve MySQL for real production scenarios.