Data from PMM, Percona's open source database management tool, shows that 58 percent of MySQL and MariaDB (a MySQL fork) instances are running MySQL 8.0, while 18.8 percent are running 5.7, which went out of support in 2023.

While users might put off database migration because of the disruption involved, they should be aware that the upgrade from MySQL 8.0 to 8.4 – the most recent stable version – is not nearly so onerous as the upgrade from 5.7 to 8.0. "It was a very big and painful jump," Zaitsev told us.