MySQL 8.4 LTS: A Balancing Innovation and Stability

Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks

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 upgrades and downgrades will be possible within the LTS release InnoDB Clone will be supported with an LTS release both for upgrading and downgrading. So, in this one, LTS gives you enormous advantages when using, upgrading and downgrading. And these are some of the considerations people have to have when they're looking at migration, upgrade and downgrade and so on. 00;05;11;10 - 00;05;46;29 So, with MySQL 8.4 LTS Right. What new opportunities will emerge for third party developers and service providers to enhance and extend that the MYSQL ecosystem? I'll just reiterate the fact that both LTS and the innovation train are GA production grade production quality and fully supported. All right. So, it's not as if we are taking any shortcuts in terms of release quality when we do innovation releases versus LTS release. 00;05;47;01 - 00;06;06;10 We do the very best we can do in terms of testing, quality assessment and so on. But, you know, anytime you a new code, it's just a fact of life. There are certain things that happen that we don't catch in our testing phase, and they do introduce instability. It's just a fact of life when it comes to new software development. 00;06;06;12 - 00;06;33;16 Having said that, when to use innovation releases, when to use LTS releases, it's up to the customer. But I can see that for those who want to access the latest features and improvements and enjoy staying on top of the latest technology innovation release is what they want. Oftentimes, these are ideal for developers and DBAs who work in a fast-developing environment. 00;06;33;19 - 00;06;57;08 They are trying to build a brand-new application. They want to take advantage of the latest features that the industry has to offer. And so, they would be very interested in doing that application development on innovation releases. And once they have built the application, they're looking for stability. Then they can adopt the next LTS release that comes with that innovation release for stability phase. 00;06;57;08 - 00;07;17;02 But I think for new application development, they there will be a lot of interest in doing it on the innovation releases. Also, if they have an interaction with us in product management and we hear from a customer, they want certain features. If you build a certain feature for them, the way they introduce it to them is through innovation release. 00;07;17;07 - 00;07;44;14 So anyways, we see that is something that's very useful for our new application development by developers. Now when to use the LTS release? Well, when you have an application where you require stability you these releases only contain necessary fixes. There is no change that breaks anything. And you basically have an application that's running fine. Your job essentially is to make sure your users use it. 00;07;44;16 - 00;08;05;19 Quality of experience is good, their application issue and so on and so forth. The application itself is not changing dramatically, right, Because it's the same application. Maybe you just upgraded to the next version and so on. And in this kind of situations, the LTS released the very appropriate. When there is less application development sort of things going on and stability is the key factor. 00;08;05;21 - 00;08;35;11 So once again, even on both MySQL, on premises as well as on the cloud side, we offer – in the heat wave that is - MySQL HeatWave. We offer both innovation and LTS release options. This model will be available both in the cloud as well as on premises. So how, how do you think the maintainers of popular open-source projects like WordPress and Drupal will change their development process with the new LTS versioning? 00;08;35;13 - 00;09;10;00 And do you think that maybe they might plan to integrate the innovation releases into their development tree? So, it's a little bit of speculation on our part. You know, first of all, most open-source products do have a similar innovation versus LTS release model. So, it's not as we're not the inventors of this, people know about that. But what I expect is that companies like WordPress or Drupal and so on, they will not be able to choose the LTS for the stable versions and the innovation releases, the innovation train or the under-development releases. 00;09;10;03 - 00;09;32;16 So, we look forward to working with our open-source products to improve the MySQL roadmap, the innovation release phase. So, this really allows us to use the innovation train as a way of addressing their requirements for us. So, we can if they ask us to add a feature, we can do that. So, they would use the innovation train for application or under-development releases. 00;09;32;19 - 00;10;13;06 But once they actually go out and make them production, we like expect them to use – rely more on the LTS release. So, I think it'll you'll see a combination of both of those things facilitating our third-party partners like WordPress and Drupal and so and so forth, how they will utilize these two releases in my opinion. So as a product management senior Vice President overseeing all of MySQL development, what features and performance and instruments of the upcoming MySQL 9 because you said earlier that the next one will be 9.0 are you the most excited about? 00;10;13;12 - 00;10;33;24 And is there a particular new feature or improvement that you can discuss with us that you feel that will be a very good for the MySQL community? I won’t list a specific feature, but let me just tell you directionally what we are trying to do in 9.0 release that I think is the part that excites me the most. 00;10;33;24 - 00;11;11;05 I think that is some of the stuff you've already heard about Gen AI integration. You know, as the vector search searches and vector store inside MySQL and so on, you know, you can really build great generic applications using MySQL. The other thing that we also plan to do in 9.0 is to use AI and AI models to simplify, demystify makes easy managing and monitoring of large sets of MySQL instances. 00;11;11;08 - 00;11;48;13 We think AI offers us a great model where we can use machine learning and these kind of algorithms to identify behavior anomalies inside your MySQL databases. So instead of you encountering a problem reporting it - users reporting the problem, then you're taking action to fix it. We really are trying to use AI in such a way such that we can identify proactively issues and areas of failure to might encounter address them before your end users are impacted. 00;11;48;15 - 00;12;17;24 So, I think AI is not just about building new AI applications in MySQL, which we will, which we are doing, and we've talked about that already in different forums, but we also want to use AI to make your MySQL databases more stable, easier to manage, and your application behavior being more predictable and less problematic. So that is another part I think that we are working on. 00;12;17;24 - 00;12;49;00 We have built-in, we collect enormous amounts of telemetry on your MySQL instances. We collect metrics, we collect traces, we collect logs, we collect events and so on and so forth. And we then essentially run large AI algorithms on the set of telemetry that we have to not only tell you what's going on right now, but to see if we can identify sequences and patterns that is indicative of a problem that will happen. 00;12;49;03 - 00;13;17;21 So anyway, this sort of new I can't be very specific about what will come, this is really something that things like AI and ML allow us to do now, that was probably not as possible, let's say two or three years ago. So, I think it's been a very interesting phase and I think you'll see more and more of that coming from our side as well, that we will use AI to tackle it things at both ends to make your experience of my skill more seamless, superior using AI. 00;13;17;28 - 00;13;47;09 And also, you can build apps on MySQL as well. So, the I think you'll hear a lot more about that. And this is some of the things that I think 9.0 release will have, and I'm working very earnestly on this and we think it'll be a pretty cool set of features that be released. Thank you very much for joining us, Mughees, in this episode about the implication of MySQL introducing the long-term support release – 8.4 the first ever LTs version of MySQL 00;13;47;09 - 00;14;06;19 So, thank you very much. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you Mughees. That's a wrap on this episode of Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks. Thanks for hanging out with us. If you enjoyed listening, please click subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We would also love your reviews and ratings on your podcast app. Be sure to join us for the next episode of Inside MySQL Sakila Speaks.