Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7

The recent release of MySQL 9.7 Long Term Support (LTS) community editions, joins MySQL 8.4 LTS as the two current LTS releases. The popular and widely used MySQL 8.0 has now reached EOL. Organizations running MySQL 8.0 should be migrating to MySQL 8.4 and evaluating the roadmap of features and capabilities of the new MySQL 9.7.

In this session, we'll take a deep dive into the new capabilities shipping in MySQL 9.7 Community Edition: full DML support for JSON Duality Views, the Hypergraph Optimizer, JavaScript stored procedures, enhanced security management, and a number of Enterprise-only components now available to all — including replication observability tools and OpenTelemetry-based telemetry integration. This talk focuses on how to responsibly evaluate and test a major version release before production deployment. We'll walk through a practical checklist covering compatibility assessment, workload testing, staged rollout strategies, and rollback planning to help developers integrating new features into application workflows, DBAs managing the migration and monitoring behavior changes, and engineering leadership weighing the timing and scope of the upgrade. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of MySQL 9.7's most impactful features and a strategy they can take directly back to their team to evaluate them.