Proposal to bump the minimum version of PostgreSQL to 9.6 and MySQL to 5.7 for Rails 7

Hi, I’d like to propose to bump the minimum version of PostgreSQL to 9.6 and MySQL to 5.7 for Rails 7.

I have opened similar pull requests for Rails 6.0 to bump the minimum version of PostgreSQL 9.3 by Bump the minimum version of PostgreSQL to 9.3 by yahonda · Pull Request #34520 · rails/rails · GitHub and MySQL to 5.6 by https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/33853.

Let me explain why.

PostgreSQL 9.6

PostgreSQL 9.3 to 9.5 are EOL

The main reason to bump the minimum version of PostgreSQL from 9.3 to 9.6 is to drop EOL versions of PostgreSQL.

According to PostgreSQL: Versioning Policy

PostgreSQL 9.3 is EOL since November 2018 PostgreSQL 9.4 is EOL since February 2020 PostgreSQL 9.5 is EOL since Feb 11, 2021

MySQL 5.7

Better support for utf8mb4 character set

Starting from Rails 6.0, the default character set of MySQL is utf8mb4.

Users who want to use this character set with MySQL 5.6 need to enable the innodb_large_prefix system variable at the MySQL server. Without enabling this system variable enabled, MySQL 5.6 users will get Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes error. MySQL 5.7.9 supports a longer index key prefix by default the there is no need to configure the MySQL server to use utf8mb4 character set.

MySQL 5.6 is “EOL” since Feb 1, 2021.

https://www.mysql.com/support/eol-notice.html

MySQL 5.6 is covered under Oracle Lifetime Sustaining Support Per Oracle’s Lifetime Support policy, as of February 1, 2021, MySQL 5.6 is covered under Oracle Sustaining Support.

Here Oracle Lifetime Sustaining Support will not provide new releases, not provide new fixes then I think we can call MySQL 5.6 is “EOL”.

https://www.mysql.com/support/

I’d like to get feedback on this proposal. Also, I’m ready to open pull requests for each bumps. Thank you.

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If the upstream devs don’t support these versions any more, it’s hard to see why new versions of Rails should.

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Thanks for the positive feedback. Opened https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/41526 to bump PostgreSQL version to 9.6. MySQL one will be opened soon.

Opened Bump minimum MySQL version to 5.7.9 by yahonda · Pull Request #41530 · rails/rails · GitHub to bump the minimum version of MySQL to 5.7.9.