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)

Our ongoing work to make sure that Vitess accepts all queries that MySQL accepts. In particular, work has focused on SET and information_schema queries. Reserved connections are still not on by default, and you might need to enable it to see all queries and frameworks well supported.

We are proud to announce that we have initial support for:

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 saw both among early adopters and large production setups.

Usability 

Ease of usability 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 the Vitess’s dynamic framework. There are a few of these in this release we would like to highlight. 

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!