So, about ten days ago the MySQL Server Team released MySQL 8.0.0 Milestone to the world. One of the most unfortunate things about MySQL development is that it’s done behind closed doors, with the only hints of what’s to come arriving in maybe a note on a bug or such milestone releases that contain a lot of code changes. How much code change? Well, according to the text up on github for the 8.0 branch “This branch is 5714 commits ahead, 4 commits behind 5.7. ”

Way back in 2013, I looked at MySQL Code Size over releases, which I can again revisit and include both MySQL 5.7 and 8.0.0.

While 5.7 was a big jump again, we seem to be somewhat leveling off, which is a good thing. Managing to add features and fix long standing problems without bloating code size is good for software maintenance. Honestly, hats off to the MySQL team for keeping it to around a 130kLOC code size increase over 5.7 (that’s around 5%).

These days I’m mostly just a user of MySQL, pointing others in the right direction when it comes to some issues around it and being the resident MySQL grey(ing)beard(well, if I don’t shave for a few days) inside IBM as a very much side project to my day job of OPAL firmware.

So, personally, I’m thrilled about no more FRM, better Unicode, SET PERSIST and performance work. With my IBM hat on, I’m thrilled about the fact that it compiled on POWER out of the box and managed to work (I haven’t managed to crash it yet). There seems to be a possible performance issue, but hey, this is a huge improvement over the 5.7 developer milestones when run on POWER.

A lot of the changes are focused around usability, making it easier to manage and easier to run at at least a medium amount of scale. This is long overdue and it’s great to see even seemingly trivial things like SET PERSIST coming (I cannot tell you how many times that has tripped me up).

In a future post, I’ll talk about the FRM removal!