On behalf of the Vitess maintainers team, I am pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 8.
Major Themes
In this release, we have continued to make important improvements to the Vitess project with over 200 PRs in several areas. Some of the major bug fixes and changes in behaviors are documented in the Release Notes. Please read them carefully and report any issues via GitHub. We would like to highlight the following themes for this release.
Compatibility (MySQL, frameworks)
We've continued our ongoing work to ensure that Vitess accepts all queries that MySQL accepts. In particular, work has focused on SET and information_schema queries. Reserved connections are still not enabled by default, and you might need to enable them to ensure all queries and frameworks are well supported.
We are proud to announce that we have initial support for:
PHP
WordPress
Mysqli
JavaScript
- TypeORM
- Sequelize
Python
- Django
- PyMySQL
- SQLAlchemy
Ruby
- Rails/ActiveRecord
Java
- JDBC
- Hibernate
Rust
- MySQL
- mysql_async
- SQLx
Tooling
- MySQL Workbench
- Mycli
Migration
Performance and error metrics and improved logging related to VReplication workflows have been added for more visibility into operational issues. Additional vtctld commands VExec and Workflow allow easier inspection and manipulation of VReplication streams.
The VStream API was enhanced to provide more information for integration with change data capture platforms: the Debezium Vitess adapter uses this capability.
We have incorporated several small feature enhancements and bug fixes based on the increased traction that VReplication has seen both among early adopters and large production setups.
Usability
Ease of use and accessibility are very important for the Vitess community. Usability improvements were another highlight received from the community.
Innovation
We continue to add integration of popular open-source tools and utilities on top of Vitess's dynamic framework. There are a few of these in this release we would like to highlight:
- VTorc: Integration of Orchestrator has continued and finally became part of Vitess. This proven open-source tool, which has been the de facto solution for MySQL failover mechanisms, is now built into Vitess. Support is experimental in 8.0, and we will continue to harden it in future releases.
- Online Schema Changes: Understanding the ALTER TABLE problem and coming up with a solution using proven tools was our goal for this release. We're able to integrate both pt-online-schema-change and gh-ost to overcome major limitations for schema migrations.
There is a shortlist of incompatible changes in this release. We encourage you to spend a moment reading the release notes.
Please download Vitess 8 and try it out!