What are the new features in MySQL 8.0

MySQL is a very powerful program in its own right. It handles a large subset of the functionality of the most expensive and powerful database packages. It uses a standard form of the well-known SQL data language. MySQL 8.0 released on 19 April 2018 and the current version is 8.0.23.

The new features in MySQL 8.0 have been briefly listed below:

Atomic DDL

An atomic data definition language (DDL) statement to combine updates made to data dictionary, storage engine operations and so on.

Encryption Defaults

The encryption defaults have been defined and implemented globally for table encryption.  The ‘default_table_encryption’ variable is used to define an encryption default for schemas that have been newly created.  The default encryption for a schema can be defined with the help of a ‘DEFAULT ENCRYPTION’ clause when a schema is being created.

Resource Groups

Resource groups can be created and managed, and the server has the ability to assign threads to resources of specific groups, that are running within the server. Group attributes can be used to control the resources, restrict or provide permission to the threads to consume the resource, and so on.

Default Character Set

After the version update, the default character set has been changed from ‘latin1’ to ‘utf8mb4’. The new character set ‘utf8mb4’ has multiple collations, and this includes ‘utf8mb4_ja_0900_as_cs’, which is the first Japanese language specific collation that has been made available for Unicode in MySQL.

JSON Enhancements

JSON enhancements were made to MySQL’s JSON functionality, where the ‘->>’, which is the inline path operator, has been added. This is equivalent to calling the ‘JSON_UNQUOTE()’ function on the result obtained after calling the ‘JSON_EXTRACT()’ function.

Control to DBAs

DBAs have been given the control to modify attributes based on workloads.  The server determines whether the virtual CPUs are available, and the DBA that has required privileges can work with these CPUs and assign them to certain resource groups and threads.

Upgrade Procedure

The upgrade procedure has changed, server takes care of tasks which were previously performed by ‘mysql_upgrade’. All the necessary upgrade tasks are performed automatically.