Oracle patching carries operational risk. The traditional approach, manual in-place updates, leaves limited margin for error. One misstep in an Oracle software home can mean hours of unplanned downtime and a difficult root-cause conversation afterward.
The latest from the MySQL community
Ideas, releases, practical guides, and perspectives from the people building with MySQL.
Percona Server for MySQL now ships with a fully open source OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication plugin, available starting with Percona Server for MySQL 8.4.11-11 and 9.7.2-2 (not yet released as of this writing). It allows a MySQL account to authenticate against any standards-compliant Identity Provider (IdP) instead of relying on a locally stored password, closing the gap with MySQL Enterprise Edition, which has offered OIDC authentication since MySQL 9.1 and, in several respects, going beyond it.
Oracle offers the same category of functionality, but its server-side plugin is part of the paid MySQL Enterprise Edition. Percona’s implementation is open source and adds three capabilities the Enterprise plugin does not provide: automatic signing-key synchronization from a JWKS endpoint, IdP group-to-role mapping, and proxy-user support. This article explains how the plugin works and why those differences …
[Read more]Databases hold an organization's most sensitive data — and in regulated industries, every action taken on database infrastructure needs to be accounted for.
With the new LTS (Long Term Support) release of MySQL 9.7.0 https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/9.7/en/ , Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) is one of the new features introduced as part of Enterprise Edition. The recent blog by Mike Frank, MySQL Product Management Director, details why DDM is important in every industry where PII (Personal Identifiable Information) data is stored […]
TL;DR If you use MD5(), SHA1(), or SHA() in MySQL today, start planning the move to SHA2(). Beginning with MySQL 9.6, MD5(), SHA1(), and SHA() are no longer native built-in SQL functions in the server binary. They are available through the Legacy Hashing Component: That component should be treated as a stopgap solution. It gives […]
Upstream MySQL published an out-of-schedule release this week with two high-severity CVE fixes. If you’re running Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 or 8.0 under Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS), the program we previously called Post EOL Support, you don’t have to do anything to qualify for them. We’ve already applied the fixes and re-released the affected ELS builds.
This is the point of ELS. When a major version reaches End of Life (EOL), the community stops shipping patches, but the databases running on it don’t stop mattering. ELS keeps critical bug and security fixes coming for versions that are past their EOL date, so you can stay on 5.7 or 8.0 on your own timeline instead of a deadline someone else set.
What we did
These CVE fixes landed upstream outside the normal cadence. Under ELS, customers are entitled to security fixes for the versions they run, so we pulled the patches into the 5.7 and 8.0 builds and …
[Read more]Keeping up with the MySQL ecosystem is becoming increasingly challenging. Every release introduces new features, performance improvements, security enhancements, and cloud capabilities. While the official documentation is comprehensive, it is not always easy to quickly identify what really matters.
To help with that, I've published a new edition of my MySQL &
MySQL HeatWave Report, covering the most important announcements
around MySQL 9.7 LTS and MySQL HeatWave 9.7.
Slides:
https://speakerdeck.com/freshdaz/mysql-and-mysql-heatwave-report-june-2026
The post MySQL & MySQL HeatWave Report – June 2026 first appeared on Data Daz (dasini.net) - Data Systems, AI, and Real-World Insights.
Update, July 1, 2026: Percona Server for MySQL 8.4.10-10 is now available. It carries the content originally planned for 8.4.9 plus the upstream security fixes. See the 8.4.10-10 release notes. 9.7.1 is still on the way; we’ll link its release notes here when it ships.
Upstream MySQL published an out-of-schedule release this week with two high-severity CVE fixes. We’ve pulled those fixes into our next builds and are skipping the two versions we had already queued: Percona Server for MySQL 8.4.9 and 9.7.0.
These fixes arrived through Oracle’s new monthly Critical Security Patch Updates (CSPUs), which Oracle announced begin May 28, 2026. CSPUs ship targeted …
[Read more]Understanding the New Cadence: Quarterly CPUs, Targeted CSPUs, and Transitioning to Calendar Versioning MySQL is updating its release model to make releases easier to understand, plan for, and follow: The goal is not simply to change the number on a release. The goal is to give users, DBAs, developers, Linux distributions, cloud platforms, and ecosystem […]
Best practices for MySQL customers and users in an AI-accelerated security landscape: A practical guide to hardening MySQL and the environment around it Oracle recently described how AI is transforming vulnerability detection and response. The latest generation of AI is increasing the speed and scale at which vulnerabilities can be identified and remediated. Oracle is […]