MySQL 8.4 LTS: A Balancing Innovation and Stability

Fred and Scott are joined by Mughees Minhas, Product Management Senior Vice President of Enterprise and Cloud Manageability for an informative discussion of the latest LTS release fo MySQL and how the new versioning of MySQL provides a balance of innovation and stability.

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Episode Transcript:

 

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;31;20
Welcome to Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks, a podcast dedicated to all things MySQL. We bring you the latest news from the MySQL team, MySQL product updates and insightful interviews with members of the MySQL community. Sit back and enjoy as your hosts bring you the latest updates on your favorite open-source database. Let's get started.
 
00;00;31;26 - 00;01;00;22
Welcome to Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks. I am leFred. and I'm Scott Stroz. Today's episode is related to the implication of MySQL introducing LTS and to talk with us, we are joined by Mughees Minas. Mughees is the senior vice president of Product Management and Marketing, Enterprise and Cloud Manageability at Oracle. With over 20 years of experience, he has been instrumental in developing some of the most widely used Oracle Database Technologies.
 
00;01;00;24 - 00;01;31;26
Currently is working on MySQL HeatWave, the next generation of cloud databases. Welcome, Mughees Hi, Fred and Scott. Nice to be here. Thank you for joining us. So, how does the introduction of MySQL 8.4 as the ELTs impact the stability and long-term support expectations for businesses and developers relying on MySQL. Well, first of all, let me say that, you know, these changes that we have brought, it really is a response to what our customers have been telling us.
 
00;01;31;28 - 00;02;04;00
So, the first thing I will say is that, yes, we do listen to our customers. Just to give you a little bit of a background. The patch releases of MySQL 5.7 and releases prior to that were focused on bug fixes and security patches. But that changed in 8.0 where we adopted this continuous delivery model in that patch releases not only contain bug fixes but also new features.
 
00;02;04;02 - 00;02;30;10
So that was good for a number of our customers because it allowed us to release new features more frequently rather than having our customers to wait for a couple of years before they can get new features. However, there's also a downside to it because there are certain customers who really want a stability and this approach of continuous delivery was causing challenges for them, for projects and applications that required stability more.
 
00;02;30;10 - 00;02;51;26
They were only interested in critical bug fixes and patches and they did not want behavioral changes. So anyway, so we've listened to the feedback. We've looked at industry trends and we've now transitioned to a versioning model which allows us to do both. It allows us to have an innovation track and an LTS or long-term support release track.
 
00;02;51;26 - 00;03;16;01
So, the first thing I would say is that we introduced our first LTS release last month - 8.4 and with this new model, our customers who want stability. They want only critical bug fixes, security fixes and so on. They can adopt the LTS version, which came out, as I said last month. And those who are interested in new features because maybe they ask for those specific ones.
 
00;03;16;04 - 00;03;53;11
We also had this innovation train that they can adopt where with every patch that they will get the latest features that we are working on. So, our goal is really to ensure that the MySQL community has an exceptional user experience with both our innovation releases as well as are LTS long term support releases. In what ways does the LTS designation for MySQL 8.4 influence decisions around migration strategies and adoption timelines for organizations who are already using MySQL or might be considering switching to MySQL?
 
00;03;53;13 - 00;04;17;20
So, as I said earlier, MySQL 8.4 is our first LTS release and this one is focused on stability and bugfixes. The next innovation release will be 9.x - 9.0 - , which will have new features straight and after two years of innovation releases. We will have the next LTS release will be 9.7, which will come out, as I said, two years from now.
 
00;04;17;23 - 00;04;48;07
And as you can see, the way the numbering works is that we'll have a release every quarter. So ,you start with 9.0 after eight quarters we are you will get to 9.7 and that becomes our next LTS release. So, the thing about consideration that on migrations and upgrading and downgrading something for the customers to be aware of is that within an LTS release, the functionality remains the same and data format does not change.
 
00;04;48;11 - 00;05;11;08
Therefore, we support in-place upgra