No More Hidden Changes: How MySQL 9.6 Transforms Foreign Key Management

The manual is still quite comprehensive, but their doc updates seemingly went off the rails during the switch to quarterly "Innovation" releases starting with MySQL 8.1, and never really recovered. They keep forgetting to update various pages at release time, for example the keywords reference or error code reference. Or sometimes omitting major changes from the release notes (which now appear to be AI generated), and then they update it retroactively, days or weeks after the release.

I used to submit doc bugs for these as I found them, and I must say the documentation team has always been very responsive and fast at fixing them, even quite recently. But I've mostly stopped submitting new doc bugs, as I can't keep spending unpaid time on this every quarter, it just isn't sustainable. They really need to have a better internal process or checklist for quarterly release doc updates.

Combined with their "closed" development process and no-longer-public worklogs (nothing under development is visible at all until the release), it becomes impossible to predict what is going to change in the next release, or what has already changed in the most recent release.

MariaDB is a lot better about everything being open/public, but they also tend to have similar delays on doc updates, occasional missing release notes items, etc. It's really strange. I mean, writing docs isn't fun, but why spend time developing a feature but then fail to mention it anywhere?

The major players tried teaming up 12 years ago but it didn't work out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebScaleSQL

The general response from the community often included complaints of there being too much fragmentation / too many forks, and that situation has only gotten worse since then.

Also MariaDB looks increasingly well-positioned to gain marketshare. They're making some strategic steps to improve MySQL compat and ease-of-migration.

Different concurrency model

What do you see as advantages of postgres over mysql? I see these comments at work quite often and there isn't always much substance behind them

A few major areas where MySQL/MariaDB excels:

Threaded connection model (no process spawning)

Undo-based MVCC (no need for vacuum)

InnoDB's use of a clustered index for PK (has pros/cons, but better for some workloads)

Ability to use alternative storage engines such as MyRocks (LSM based instead of B-tree; best-in-class compression)

Support for index hints (so query plans won't randomly change and bring your site down)

More mature logical replication (fully supports DDL, has no concept of limited "replication slots", etc)

That all said, there are also many areas where Postgres is better! Like all things in computer science, there are architectural trade-offs, and no single silver bullet is the best choice for all workloads.

I saw that page, but interestingly enough I don't see that quote on there

I appreciate this actually. It’s been hard sorting through the noise

Valid point, Percona pointed that out in the blog actually. The codebase is old, and a lot of ridiculous bugs have been worked out it.