What’s New in MySQL 8.0 RC1? Key Features for Modern Apps

MySQL 8 Overview

MySQL 8 RC1 was released on GitHub by Oracle to bridge the gap between MySQL and modern applications, emphasizing mobile‑first support and full Unicode (UTF‑8) handling, which enables extensive emoji usage.

Enhanced JSON Support

JSON handling has been significantly improved: new native JSON type checks, functions to inspect array/object size on disk, a pretty‑print formatter, range support in JSON path expressions, partial‑update optimizations, and better performance for sorting and indexing JSON data.

Document Store Improvements

The Document Store now offers consistent read‑write semantics with full transaction support, allowing NoSQL‑style CRUD APIs while still being accessible via standard SQL. Indexing capabilities have been expanded, including spatial indexes and full‑text search on partial JSON documents.

Additional New Features

Common Table Expressions (CTE) and window functions

Improved handling of hot rows

Unicode 9.0 support

Enhanced query consistency

GIS support

Cloud integration

Local data dictionary

Invisible indexes

Improved default values

Refactoring and modernization of the codebase

For a complete list of highlights see the official MySQL 8.0 RC1 highlights page and the source code repository at https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/tree/8.0.