Ghost upgrade from 4.44.0 to 4.46.0 breaks ghost - resolved?

I see this topic was locked… and I am planning on Ghost upgrades, so want to be prepared for the issue… getting nervous about doing the 19 Ghost+Casper upgrades pending since 1st April.

Reading through, did anyone try a simple ALTER TABLE for Debian Stable/ MariaDB users to fix the issue?

The decision to use NULL defaults for dates is unusual - our inhouse experience has always been that ‘0000-00-00’ was a better default because empty dates are better handled in application logic rather than auto-thrown exceptions… but hey - maybe.

FWIW, MariaDB is the default implementation on Debian for package mysql-server - because of the FOSS concerns that Debian are a bit uptight about. And MySQL8 is not directly available on Debian stable - you have to use the community repos. Cannonical clearly take a more pragmatic approach.

Also worth noting that, MariaDB is actively maintained by the original writers of MySQL because of their concerns over the directions and prioritisation of Oracle. They claim much better performance and throughput - though this is not really an issue for Ghost databases.

The biggest plus for MariaDB though is Galera multi-master clustering - this is a FOSS High Availability implementation that works incredibly well for database replication / reliability. Other DBs usually offer this as a paid / commercial option only. If you want a HA high performance FOSS database architecture, Galera is amazing.

The upgrade to MYSQL8 on Debian Stable is not trivial - I’ve gone through it on a couple of dev hosts and two test hosts - none of them will do a clean in-place upgrade.

It’s a case of stop everything, database dumps, purge MariaDB and all config, move MYSQL data out of the way, clean install of MySQL8 community, reload all the database dumps, restart everything and test. Made much more complex when you have other apps using the database on the same servers, sigh.