The MySQL team has announced “version 8“, you can see highlights of the planned release at the link.

You can find internal documentation on MySQL 8 here. This will be useful to developers and DBAs trying to understand what’s going on inside MySQL.

The MySQL Team blog will be a good source of ongoing information.

Another member of the MySQL team with a blog is Morgan Tocker. He calls it Master MySQL.

You know, MySQL is a very popular database for “Web applications”. That is more due to the fact that it was easy for application developers to use without help from DBAs that it is due to its intrinsic qualities as a relational database engine. The fact that there are offshots like MariaDB and Percona that claim to provide a “better MySQL” as well as the fact of the emergence of alternate data management strategies attest to some of the challenges MySQL presents. In spite of all that, many of the highest volume sites and services out there (booking.com, paypal.com, facebook.com, square) are still using MySQL, which goes to show that where there is a will, there is a way. If you visit the MySQL “Customers” page, it takes you to a list of customers, and a number of them have case studies or presentations that describe what their “way” was.

Reading the initial feature list for MySQL, and having had the opportunity to attend a feedback session that the MySQL Engineering team held for its key customers during OracleWorld, I can safely say that the MySQL team understands product’s architectural deficiencies and is working hard to address them. These issues are widely understood in the community – there are numerous blogs and threads out on the web discussing them. A focal change in MySQL 8.0 will be the creation of a “real Data Dictionary implemented as a set of SQL tables stored in InnoDB” (quoted from the first link above). Others are the elimination of several global mutexes (essentially locks that were applied system wide), support for Histograms, and related optimizer and performance schema changes. All things to look forward to.