On behalf of the Vitess maintainers, I am pleased to announce the general availability of Vitess 9.

Major Themes

In this release, we have focused on making Vitess more stable after the successful release of Version 8. There have been no major issues reported. So there were no patches released for Version 8. This has allowed us to push further on compatibility and adoption of common frameworks as priorities. We have compiled all improvements into 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 is to make sure that Vitess accepts all queries that MySQL does. We continually focus on SET and information_schema queries in this release as well as other common and complex queries. Several parts of the query serving module have been refactored to facilitate further compatibility enhancements. 

Please note that reserved connections are still not on by default, and you should plan to test it first in a test environment, to ensure that all your queries and frameworks are supported, before enabling it in production.

Migration

Enhanced logging and metrics have been added to VReplication for helping to debug stalled and failing VReplication workflows and for increased visibility into other operational and performance-related issues.

VReplication support for JSON columns, which was previously incomplete, has been refactored and is now functionally complete.

A new version (v2) of the VReplication workflow CLI commands have been introduced. These incorporate functional and UX improvements based on user experience and feedback. These are deemed experimental (but fully functional) and we welcome feedback and suggestions on improving them further. 

Innovation

There has been a significant push towards streamlining Online Schema Changes

As always, please validate any new features in your test environments before using them in production.

Documentation

Two new user guides have been created for new adopters of Vitess:

There is a shortlist of incompatible changes in this release. We encourage you to spend a moment reading the release notes and see if any of these will affect you.

Please download Vitess 9 and try it out!