Disclaimer: This post is aimed to you, the curious developer, sys-admin, technologist, whatever-title-you-use. DO NOT run the following lines on production. Not even in a stable environment, do this if you don’t care about the outcome of the current data.

If you want to keep up with the newest MySQL developer milestones I have news for you: there is no upgrade available for milestone versions. The way to go is to remove old version and install new one, according to their website:

Upgrades between milestone releases (or from a milestone release to a GA release) are not supported. For example, upgrading from 8.0.0 to 8.0.1 is not supported, as neither are GA status releases.

So if you, like me, had the 8.0.0 version and want to test the 8.0.1 (alhtough 8.0.3 milestone is already in development) you need to do something like the following (tutorial based on Debian/Ubuntu servers).

Stop your service:

$ sudo service mysql stop

Download Oracle’s repository and install it, as of now this is the current version, you can get the new package here:

$ wget https://dev.mysql.com/get/mysql-apt-config_0.8.6-1_all.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i mysql-apt-config_0.8.6-1_all.deb

Clean your old install, you will lose all the data. Be careful, back up is on you!

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge mysql-server mysql-client mysql-common
$ sudo apt autoremove
$ sudo apt-get autoclean
$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server

This is the way to go to test the new features such as Descending Indexes and others. Remember, the new default encoding was changed from latin1 to utf8mb4.

Short feature list:

• Descending Indexes
• New Data Dictionary
• New GROUPING() function to distinguish NULL values for super-aggregated rows, more information
• Recursive queries using WITH

The complete list is available here.

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