MySQL 8.1 Released With More JSON Additions, Other Changes

MySQL 8.1 is available today with the community server builds now available for this latest major update to this popular SQL database server.

While many in the free software world have turned to the MariaDB fork, for those interested in upstream MySQL the MySQL Community Server 8.1 release is now available. This is a significant release with MySQL 8.0 having debuted back in April 2018. Among the additions with MySQL 8.1 is allowing the EXPLAIN FORMAT=JSON output to be used with an INTO option to allow the JSON-formatted EXPLAIN output to be stored into a user variable for use with MySQL JSON functions. Also on the JSON front, MySQL 8.1 also adds the SHOW PARSE_TREE statement for showing a JSON-formatted parse tree for a SELECT statement.

The MySQL 8.1 client now preserves comments. Up to now the default MySQL behavior was stripping of comments by the MySQL client while with v8.1 it's been decided to preserve them unless launching the client with "--skip-comments".

MySQL 8.1 also brings improved logging of the shutdown process to help in troubleshooting and debugging problems.

More details on the MySQL 8.1 changes via the release notes. MySQL 8.1 community server builds are available at dev.mysql.com.