In November we held our first MySQL 5.8 planning session in London. On behalf of the MySQL team, I would like to thank you for your feature requests and suggestions. We reviewed over 150 pieces of feedback in total, and are looking forward to prioritizing a number of suggestions:

In MySQL 5.8, we are planning to make two important changes to modernize our code base. To explain each in more detail:

C++11 Required

We are looking forward to being able to use the new atomics support in C++11 in new feature development, as well as cleaning up and simplifying existing code as time allows.

Since this change requires compiler support, our minimum requirements will also increase. For Linux the minimum will now be EL6, and Windows will now require Visual Studio 2015.

Native Partitioning Required

In MySQL 5.7 we moved partitioning from being a Storage Engine that sits above other Storage Engines to being part of the Storage Engine API itself. We describe this difference as “native partitioning”; the advantage is that we are able to improve memory usage, and more easily implement new features such as foreign key support and global indexes.

We are happy with the feedback we have received so far on native partitioning (from a user upgrading perspective, it is only a meta-data change). In MySQL 5.8, we are planning to remove support for non-native partitioning. This change will bring some simplification to development as storage engines will now own tables and indexes.

Please get in touch

If either of these changes affect you, please get in touch. We would be happy to work with you and help with upgrading.

Thank you for using MySQL!