MySQL has had spatial indexes for many years, but they have all been Cartesian (X and Y coordinates) indexes. MySQL 8.0 adds support for geographic (latitude-longitude) indexes. In an earlier blog post, I described how the feature works. In this post, we’ll go into the details of how to upgrade from 5.7 to 8.0 if you have spatial indexes.…

MySQL 8.0 brings a lot of exciting new features and improvements. To make sure that your 5.7 system is ready for an upgrade there are certain steps you should take, described in our documentation: upgrade prerequisites. To make this process as quick and easy as possible we are introducing in MySQL Shell version 8.0.4 new utility called “Upgrade checker” (UC).…

In MySQL 8.0.2 DMR we will introduce features which make managing undo tablespaces easier in InnoDB.

The main improvement is that you can now create and drop undo tablespaces at any time.  You can change the config file setting before any startup, whether recovery is needed or not. …

MySQL 5.6 introduced  the fractional second precision for temporal data types – TIME, DATETIME, and TIMESTAMP,  with up to microseconds (6 digits) precision. Along with providing fractional second precision, the new implementation for temporals is disk efficient.

What is an “Old Temporal”?…

In a world moving towards Unicode and UTF-8, a lot of applications still use some one-byte character set. And since one-byte characters usually accepts any byte in the range 0x00-0xFF it often works well to store and retrieve any data in such character strings, e.g.…

In MySQL 8.0 our plan is to drastically improve support for utf8. While utf8 support itself dates back to MySQL 4.1, there exist some limitations. The “sushi = beer” problem in the title refers to Bug #76553. Sushi and beer don’t even go well together, at least not to my taste:-) I will use this bug as an example to explain issues with utf8 collations in the past and our plans for utf8 support going forward.…

Ubuntu 16.04 artwork by Canonical Ltd (CC-BY-SA).

Congratulations to Ubuntu on releasing 16.04 LTS with MySQL 5.7! As far as I know, it’s the first stable release of a Linux distro that contains MySQL 5.7. Fedora and openSUSE also have MySQL 5.7, but not yet in a stable release.…

One of the more frequently asked questions with MySQL 5.7 is “How can I upgrade my JSON data from using TEXT in an earlier version of MySQL to use the native JSON data type?”. Today I wanted to show an example of how to do so, using sample data from SF OpenData.…

At a recent optimizer webinar, I talked about MySQL introducing a new style for hints, and that MySQL 5.7 also added support for more hints, see Sergey Glukhov’s blog. A question I got at the end of the webinar was what to do with the hints in the application code after an upgrade?…

MySQL has supported the GET_LOCK() function for a large part of its history. As the manual notes, GET_LOCK() can be used to implement application locks or to simulate record locks.

Changes in MySQL 5.7

In MySQL 5.7 we improved GET_LOCK() to be based on our internal meta-data locking system (MDL).…