This tutorial explains multiple ways to check MySQL Version. You will also learn about MySQL Version history:
Versioning is a means to categorize features & enhancements and provide a number or tag to a particular release of the Software. Almost all the standard software follows semantic versioning in order to number or name the versions.
It’s often important to understand what version of MySQL you are currently running.
While it’s always available during the install time, and after installation, you can make use of certain commands that MySQL offers to get the version details of the MySQL Server that you are running.
=> Take A Look At The MySQL Beginners Guide Here
Table of Contents:
How To Check MySQL Version
In this tutorial, you will learn how you can use commands to check the version information of the MySQL server you are running along with a basic overview of the current version of MySQL and its comparison with the older ones.
MySQL VERSION() Function
This function returns the current version of the MySQL database as a String.
SELECT VERSION();
In the above screenshot, you can see that the current version of the MySQL Server is 8.0.20
SHOW VERSION Using Variables
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "%version%";
Using STATUS Command in MySQL Command Line
Connect to MySQL on the command line. Run the STATUS Command:
The output of the above command is as shown below:
You can see along with the other details like the current user, connection details, etc, the version information in the ‘Server version’ field.
MySQL Version History
The latest version of MySQL that’s in General Availability (GA) is MySQL 8.0.23
For release notes against this version, please refer to the official page of MySQL here.
In general, the latest major release is MySQL 8.0 with regular patched releases is happening from time to time.
Let’s have a look at the major versions of MySQL released for general availability.
| Release | General Availability from | End of support |
|---|---|---|
| 5.1 | Nov’08 | Dec’13 |
| 5.5 | Dec’10 | Dec’18 |
| 5.6 | Feb’13 | Feb’21 |
| 5.7 | Oct’15 | Oct’23 |
| 8 | Apr’18 | Apr’26 |
Some of the features in MySQL 8.0 over the older ones are:
- Support for MySQL Window functions & Common table expressions.
- JSON table functions for working with JSON data type.
- DDL statements are now more reliable as they are now atomic and crash-safe.
- Enhancements to performance schema and error logging.
To view the release notes and details for all the patch releases in MySQL 8.0.11 to MySQL8.0.23, you can refer to the official documentation of MySQL here
Note: It’s important to note here, that the MySQL release jumped from version 5 to 8 directly due to a lot of major features and enhancements from MySQL5.
Also, the intermediate releases bearing the numbers 6 & 7 didn’t go through general availability but remained as Alpha releases.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q #1) What is meant by status in MySQL?
Answer: The STATUS command in MySQL is used to display the information related to the current user session and different system variables.
Q #2) How can we get the current version in MySQL?
Answer: It can be obtained using the VERSION() function from the query executor. You can run the below command to fetch the version.
SELECT VERSION();
Q #3) What is the current MySQL Version?
Answer: The current MySQL version in General Availability is MySQL 8.0
The latest available patch release is MySQL 8.0.23 (released on 18th Jan 2021)
Q #4) Is MySQL 8.0 free?
Answer: MySQL is available as free software under GPL license and is also available under a lot of paid licenses depending upon the features used.
MySQL Community Edition is free to use whereas MySQL Enterprise Edition with features such as cloud availability etc is available as licensed software from different vendors like Oracle.
Please note that all the code of MySQL is open-sourced and can be referred to the GitHub repository here.
Q #5) Which is better – MySQL or MariaDB?
Answer: Both MariaDB and MySQL have their own set of pros and cons. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL with some advanced features when compared to MySQL.
Some features supported by MariaDB vs MySQL are as given below:
- MariaDB has 12 supported storage engines while MySQL has fewer options.
- MariaDB is faster when compared to MySQL
- Offers backward compatibility with MySQL
- Supports faster and safer replication.
It’s also important to note here that MariaDB is a full binary replacement of MySQL i.e. anyone who is currently using MySQL can shift to MariaDB (i.e MariaDB is backward compatible with MySQL).
For a detailed comparison between MySQL and MariaDB refer to our tutorial here.
Q #6) How do you check the MySQL version?
Answer: To know the version that’s currently being installed, you can simply run a command – SELECT VERSION()
In order to get the latest MySQL version, you can visit MySQL’s official page here and that would point to the latest version in General Availability (i.e. public release). You also have a choice to install/download any older ones from the archive section here
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we learned about fetching the current version of the MySQL Server instance.
There are different ways through which we can get these details as shown below.
- Version variables
- VERSION() function
- Through command-line connection
It’s often important to know what version you are currently onto so that in case of any version-specific issues/bugs it’s easy to report and reproduce. Also, there are version-specific features available in MySQL – so it’s easy to distinguish what features are available in which version.
Additionally, you can see all the details of the published versions and released notes on the official webpage of the MySQL Versions.
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