GitLab Is Ending Support For MySqL In 12.1

Gitlab recently said that MySQL has not been great for GitLab's use cases and it slows the production team down while posing a number of limitations.

These limitations include the inability to support nested groups with MySQL in a performant way and requirement of using hacks to increase limits on columns which can lead to MySQL refusing to store data. Moreover, MySQL doesn't have the ability to add TEXT type column without length specified.

The company said, to keep supporting MySql, it ended of creating a lot of MySQL-specific code. And many a time this also led to merge requests that were twice as complex since they had to support a second database backend. "Creating and maintaining this code is a drain on our cycle time and velocity, and it puts a dampener on our value of iteration."

GitLab also said that deprecating support for MySQL reduces the time for GitLab's CI jobs, and thus reduces the costs. These costs sum up being considerable, and as most of the GitLab customers are on PostgreSQL it is difficult to justify the expense with the small number of users choosing MySQ.