Best of MySQL — March 2026

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of growwenggGroww Engineering·11w

    How Groww Migrated from MySQL to CockroachDB to Power Its Cell-Based Architecture (Part 1)

    Groww, a financial platform, migrated from MySQL to CockroachDB to support a cell-based architecture capable of 10x scale. MySQL's lack of native sharding and multi-cloud failover paths drove the decision. CockroachDB was chosen for its PostgreSQL compatibility, full ACID compliance, multi-region active-active deployment (RPO=0, RTO<10s), and its 'Regional By Row' feature that enables moving users between cells by updating a single column. Key migration challenges included eliminating auto-increment IDs (replaced with UUIDs or cached sequences), fixing sequential index hotspots using hash-sharded indexes, and handling nullable column indexes with partial indexes. An automated pipeline was built to move data with minimal downtime. Part 2 will cover multi-region node deployment and cell-to-region mapping.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of laravelLaravel·12w

    Laravel February Product Updates

    Laravel's February 2026 updates span the entire ecosystem. The Framework 12.x gained AI SDK provider default model configuration via config/ai.php, a new Svelte starter kit with Inertia, and VS Code test runner integration. Laravel Cloud launched a fully programmable API for managing deployments, databases, and scaling (useful for CI/CD and AI agents), a new CLI, and issued a MySQL 8.0 end-of-life notice urging upgrades to 8.4 LTS before April 2026. Laravel Forge added npm private package support with automatic .npmrc management, MySQL 9.x support for new servers, and an OpenClaw server type. Laravel Nightwatch introduced an MCP server for querying observability data from your editor, Linear integration for issue tracking, sort-by-occurrences for exceptions, and per-user filtering across requests, jobs, and logs.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·10w

    Why I, as Someone Who Likes MySQL, Now Want to Recommend PostgreSQL

    A long-time MySQL user explains why they now recommend PostgreSQL for new projects. The post acknowledges that many historical PostgreSQL weaknesses (VACUUM complexity, DDL operations, replication) have become less relevant in the managed cloud era. It then details concrete application-level advantages PostgreSQL still holds: ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING vs INSERT IGNORE, the RETURNING clause for getting back changed rows, more natural VALUES usage in JOINs and UPDATEs, window functions in update processing via CTEs, partial indexes, deferred foreign key constraints, pgvector support, and simpler character set/collation handling. The conclusion is not that MySQL is bad, but that PostgreSQL offers clearer advantages for application implementation today.

  4. 4
    Article
    Avatar of do_communityDigitalOcean Community·11w

    How To Work with JSON in MySQL

    MySQL 5.7.8+ supports a native JSON data type that bridges relational and document-style storage. This tutorial walks through creating a database schema with a JSON column, then demonstrates CRUD operations using MySQL's built-in JSON functions: JSON_OBJECT, JSON_ARRAY, JSON_MERGE_PRESERVE for creating data; JSON_EXTRACT (and the -> operator) for querying; JSON_INSERT, JSON_REPLACE, and JSON_SET for updating; and JSON_REMOVE for deleting specific keys. The second half covers integrating this with Laravel's Eloquent ORM, including migrations with json() column type, model casting of JSON to arrays, and querying JSON attributes using the attributes->key syntax in where clauses.

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