This is an unstable release, please don’t use in production.
It was rumored that the new MySQL version would be 8 and not as 5.8 as a lot of people thought, and it appears the rumors were true.
Below are some of the features that caught my eye at first glance:
Roles
Although password expiration was implemented 5.7, the newer version bring a set of collective privileges as a Role. No need to have to copy paste that massive GRANT command you had when creating new users.
UTF-8 as default Charset
This is not yet the default charset coming with the server, but utf8mb4 will be the main charset instead of latin1, and the default collation will change from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8mb4_800_ci_ai. The plan is to do that before General Availability.
Invisible Indexes
Giving an index already exists, you can make it active or inactive. It is a toggling feature which enables the debugging work to see if an index really can be dropped (if it is not being used). This is for the search only, on write operations the index is still maintained.
IPv6 and UUID Manipulation
MySQL do not support those fields natively, however, it is recommended to store those items with the VARBINARY(16) type. MySQL now provides functions to manipulate textual representations of IPv6/UUID and to use bit-wise operations, to test, extract or compare.
Having those function built in, you can use a generated column to index that data.
Source
A more comprehensive list can be found at the MySQL Server Blog. It is worth the read.
gabi.dev 