Try not to put off upgrading your vital infrastructure software for more than one release, and if you do make custom code changes to an open source project, prepare for the extra work integrating those patches again when the updated version of the software appears. Those are but a few of the lessons you might glean from a Facebook blog item posted Thursday, documenting the company’s sometime-treacherous large-scale leapfrog migration to MySQL version 8.0, from an ancient 5.6 version it had been using of Oracle‘s open source MySQL database system.

They had to use logical dump to capture the data and rebuild the database servers from scratch — work that took several days in some instances.

At the beginning of the job (which is still underway), the company had 1,700 code patches originally written for v5.6 that needed to be ported to 8.0 in some form. Some APIs that were deprecated in 5.7 were taken out entirely by version 8.0, which meant that Facebook developers had to rewrite application code that relied on these old APIs.

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