The world’s most popular open-source database got an improvement with the announcement of the improved MySQL 8.0 back in late 2016. Any database-driven web applications rely on MySQL to function properly and perform. Some popular applications include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and our very own, Ottomatik.Also, popular websites including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr are some of that use MySQL extensively.In this post, we will look at all the new functionalities that came with MySQL 8.0. Going through all the iterations and the latest updates of MySQL would take more than one article. Today, we look at the general functionalities and improvements of MySQL 8.0 across the board.

MySQL 8.0 has many features that a lot of developers were eagerly waiting for as we’ll see below. The areas of improvement include GIS, regular expressions, SQL, and JSON. UTF8MB4 also features as MySQL 8.0’s default character set enabling developers to store Emojis.Windowing has been among the coveted feature in MySQL. This function boasts the similarity of the grouped aggregate functions. Windowing allows you to perform some calculation on sets of rows using functions COUNT or SUM.