September 2025 Recap: Azure Database for MySQL
Join us live on our YouTube channel on October 15, 2025 for an exclusive webinar where we’ll dive deeper into the latest Azure Database for MySQL updates and answer your questions! Watch it live here. Support for In-Place Major Version Upgrade from 8.0 to 8.4 We previously announced that Azure Database for MySQL version 8.4 is now generally available. We’re now happy to share that in-place major version upgrade is supported for MySQL servers from 8.0 to 8.4. If you’re currently on MySQL 5.7, you’ll first need to perform an in-place upgrade from 5.7 to 8.0, and then upgrade from 8.0 to 8.4. Learn more. Near-Zero-Downtime Maintenance - General Availability You can now take advantage of near-zero-downtime maintenance for Azure Database for MySQL with high availability (HA) enabled. This capability is now generally available and is supported by our new HA architecture based on a dedicated Azure Standard Load Balancer design. Thanks to the dedicated Standard Load Balancer design, maintenance is now faster and no longer impacted by client-side DNS caching, which previously caused brief connection drops in some scenarios. This enhancement ensures that your mission-critical workloads remain continuously available, even during infrastructure updates, helping you meet strict uptime requirements and maintain operational continuity. Learn more. We would love your feedback We look forward to your feedback as you explore these enhancements and continue building with Azure Database for MySQL. If you have any suggestions or queries about our service, please let us know by emailing us at AskAzureDBforMySQL@service.microsoft.com. To learn more about what's new with Flexible Server, see What's new in Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements by following us on social media: YouTube | LinkedIn | X. Thanks for being part of our community!
Why should you migrate to PostgreSQL 15?
Recently one of my customers shared the below code snippet and I was looking for ways to gain performance. The code snippet A simple function that has evaluated expression in a loop for one billion iterations. function speed_test(p_loops int) returns int language plpgsql as $$ declare v_number bigint; v_multiplier float = 3.14159; loop_cnt bigint; begin for loop_cnt in 1..p_loops * 1000000 loop v_number := 333; v_number := v_number * v_multiplier; end loop; return 0; end;$$; The piece of code shared caught my attention because the code has evaluated expressions, and this was one of the areas where improvements were made after PostgreSQL 12. I ran a simple test to prove this. Test run on PostgreSQL v12: I ran the code run on PostgreSQL v12 in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. Region: West Europe SKU: GP D2ds_v4, 2 vCores 8 GB RAM, 128 GB Storage Test run on PostgreSQL v15: The same piece of code was run on PostgreSQL v15 in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. Region: West Europe SKU: GP D2ds_v4, 2 vCores 8 GB RAM, 128 GB Storage We can clearly see that the code snippet on PostgreSQL 15 is 5x faster than PostgreSQL 12. The rationale behind this is several patches that reduced the overhead of the expression's value in PL/pgSQL. PL/pgSQL was not originally designed for extensive numeric calculations like this but the need was realized as more and more developers started to use it this way, so over time there were several commits by the community that lead to this performance improvement. If you are curious to know more about this, check out this and this commit, which describes the improvements and history of this change. Thanks to Pavel Stehule from the PostgreSQL community to point out the rationale and consolidate out the commits associated with this change. If you are on an older version of PostgreSQL like PostgreSQL 12, this is just one of many other reasons to upgrade to PostgreSQL 15. You can see the feature matrix here. PostgreSQL15 will be released on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server soon. If your workload is already running an older version of PostgreSQL, then plan your upgrade using the Major Version Upgrade.
