With Aurora MySQL 8 now generally available to all, you may want to consider the plan for an upgrade path if you would like to take advantage of the new features for your application, for example, Common Table Expressions (CTE). This new major release has a much improved and streamlined upgrade progress from Aurora MySQL 5.7.
This tutorial will provide all the steps to allow you to try out setting up an Aurora cluster and performing an upgrade without the impact on your existing AWS environment. The two pre-requisites to getting started are:
- An AWS account. The Free 1 year AWS account provides many of the services used in these tutorials at no or little cost.
- The awscli. See Installing AWS CLI Version 2 .
You can find all the CLI cut/paste commands in my AWS Tutorials repo. This will lead you through all of the various AWS dependencies for a successful RDS Aurora cluster including IAM, KMS, VPC and EC2 requirements.
Create an RDS Aurora MySQL Cluster and Aurora MySQL Major upgrade – Aurora 2.x to Aurora 3.x can provide you with a POC of the primary operations path to achieving the goal of this post in under 30 minutes.
While this example will produce an upgraded cluster with some warnings, in real life a more detailed upgrade assessment is needed for any new version of software. The MySQL and Aurora pre-checks can be performed to minimize surprises during the final process of your data migration.
mysqlcheck –check-upgrade and the mysqlsh util.checkForServerUpgrade() pre-checks can help to assist in being prepared and not have your Cluster instances with the incompatible-parameters status. At this point download the upgrade-prechecks.log Aurora Log and trash your cluster and instance. They are unusable. Reviewing the upgrade-prechecks.log can contain more information than mysqlsh util.checkForServerUpgrade() output.
With an Aurora cluster configured with an instance parameter group enabling MySQL binary log replication, it is easy to have a functioning Aurora 5.7 Cluster with real-time replication to an Aurora 8 Cluster to minimize any downtime in your production environment and then benefit from an atomic data dictionary, roles, descending indexes, improved internal temporary table, additional JSON functions, Window Functions, CTEs and more!
More Reading
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraMySQL.Updates.3010.html
- https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/amazon-aurora-mysql-3-with-mysql-8-0-compatibility-is-now-generally-available/
- https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/upgrading-from-previous-series.html
- https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/mysql-features/