MySQL has over the years grown into a considerable family of products and components. Years ago, someone running MySQL would typically have a single Server instance. Advanced users might have two and run replication.

These days, MySQL is much more of a distributed system, offering advanced replication technology for HA, load balancing, systems for monitoring and backup, modern tooling, and connectors for a bunch of modern platforms and languages. At the same time, the overall pace of innovation in MySQL has increased a lot, as the bustle of activity over on the MySQL Server team blog shows.

The breadth of products and technologies offered, plus the rapid march forward poses some challenges for anyone wanting to put together an advanced MySQL setup, and getting together all the correct versions of the different bits can become a bit of a puzzle. That is why we are taking the step of aligning version numbers across most of our products. So from 8.0 onwards, almost all the different bits in each release round from us will carry the same version number.

Now, before this decision was made, some of our products had already revved all the way up to 8.0.10, so there was a bit of a challenge with the initial sync-up. And that is why the next MySQL 8.0 you see from us will carry the version number 8.0.11, despite the latest release candidate being versioned 8.0.4. Simple as that.

P.S. For the uninitiated: the reference up there in the headline is to this scene from the iconic 1984 movie Spinal Tap.