Hidden changes indeed... I'm glad Oracle did a blog post about this, because otherwise it's largely missing from the MySQL documentation. This is really disappointing considering that 9.6 was released over two weeks ago, yet as of this moment:

* The new innodb_native_foreign_keys server variable has only two vague sentences describing its effect: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.6/en/innodb-parameters.ht...

* The MySQL 9.6 release notes make no mention of foreign key changes whatsoever, nor of the innodb_native_foreign_keys variable: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/9.6/en/news-9-6-0.h...

* The "What is New in MySQL 9.6" manual page is currently just a copy-and-paste of that page from MySQL 9.5, with all the "9.5"'s replaced with "9.6": https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html vs https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html

As an independent software vendor providing solutions focused on MySQL, honestly I find this situation to be deeply concerning.

I have heard that an Oracle exec made a lot of promises about renewed MySQL Community Edition attention at a pre-FOSDEM event a few days ago; can we take any of that seriously if even basic documentation updates are not occurring?

Back in the day (MySQL 5.0-5.5 era, when I was working at MySQL/Sun/Oracle in the MySQL support team) the MySQL documentation team was truly amazing and sets the standard for me even today compared to many other docs teams I see.

They had a very long and comprehensive manual. The manual on each page inter-linked easily to switch between the relevant page for different major versions with a dropdown version selector (3.x, 4.x, 5.0, 5.1, 5.5..etc).. and if a page had moved or didn't exist it always accurately redirect to the correct page as you did that switch.

And almost every single engineering change that ever mattered to me made it into the changelog and also had relevant docs. I could largely rely on it and didn't need "git log" like I mostly need today to figure out what changed in a version.

Partly this was process, every closed bug/change went to the docs team to process.. but the team was also fantastic and converting that into relevant docs and writing great docs.

A shame if that has been lost, they did have a stack of layoffs recently in MySQL.. apparently the developer team is also heavily down from where it was. I am sure this writing is a little biased but interesting reading never the less: https://mariadb.org/reading-the-room-what-europes-mysql-comm...