Oracle’s MySQL 5.7 has had a good, long run, but the official End of Life is October of 2023. The Era of MySQL 5.x will be over, and only MySQL 8.0 will be officially supported. Yup, six months away. So if you are running MySQL, you need to consider upgrading to version 8.0 N-O-W!!
What does an upgrade provide?
MySQL 8.0 has many really cool features and improvements that are well worth the upgrade. The default character set of UTF8MB4 gives Unicode version 9.0 support. So you get the Umaluts, Cedils, and C-J-K Language support in your data, plus emojis. 8.0 is optimized around this character set. This gives you all the international characters you probably need to support global operations.
The Structured Query Language has been greatly enhanced. If you have trouble writing subqueries, you rejoice in lateral-derived joins and Common Table Expressions (CTEs). There is a new intersect clause to aid with sets. …
[Read more]