Monday, March 30, 2020

MidWestPHP Conference -- Online -- this Friday

After six solid weeks on the road earlier this year, I was looking forward to taking most of the month of March at home.  Many shows on my schedule have canceled in the wake pf the Covid-19 virus.  One of those shows, Mid West PHP, has morphed into an online conference this Friday.  And did I mention the keynotes and the beginner tracks are FREE!

I will be speaking on new features in MySQL 8.0 on the Enterprise track.

Details at https://midwestphp.org/schedule

Monday, March 16, 2020

MySQL 5.6 End of Life is February 2021

You will be hearing a lot from me and others about the product end of life (EOL) of MySQL version 5.6 which will be February 2021.

Why?

While MySQL 8.0 is a vast leap forward over previous versions and MySQL 5.7 is fantastic, there are a lot of software still running and still dependent on MySQL 5.6.  And those sites running 5.6 need some encouragement to upgrade.

MySQL 5.6 came out in February of 2013 and will no longer be supported in 2021.  It has had a good run but if you are still running 5.6 then you need to upgrade.  And while I urge you to do so sooner than later, I know that some of you have more than full plates and need to plan for this upgrade.

So what you do you? First --  read this blog by my very clever colleague LeFred.

Second -- read the very fine MySQL Documentation.  Remember you can upgrade directly from MySQL 5.6 to 5.7 but those wanting to go to 8.0 still need to make the 5.7 as an intermediate step.  And I really recommend that 8.0 upgrade as it has so many new features and some really big performance gains too.  Heck - The new MySQL Shell (mysqlsh) has a utility to check your MySQL 5.7 instances for potential issues before you upgrade to 8.0!

Third -- do not forget the MySQL Forums and the MySQL Community Slack channel. They are there for you to ask questions and get answers.

Lastly - Do not neglect Planet.MySQL.com to keep track of the pulse of all things MySQL.

And yes, I will be reminding those out there to upgrade up until next February.