MySQL remains one of the most common and consistent elements in the modern application programming stack. If you want a database for your app or service, and your needs are fairly generic, MySQL is one of the easy defaults. It’s widely used and well-understood, so you can draw on a wealth of community knowledge and experience when deploying MySQL for your particular application.
The latest major revision, MySQL 8, fixes a number of long-standing issues with MySQL—changes major enough to demand a revision to the left of the decimal point.
In this article we’ll walk through the basic steps needed to bring up a standard MySQL 8 server installation. Along the way we’ll pay attention to the settings you need to keep in mind both when installing fresh or upgrading from a previous MySQL installation.
Note that the discussion in this article focuses on the community open-source edition of MySQL 8, not the enterprise edition. The enterprise edition has more advanced features available only with a commercial license.
