[stingraycharles]

Sounds like you took a calculated risk and it backfired. Google Cloud SQL even has it in their documentation that they automatically do these upgrades, and you were relying on unsupported behavior of the database. Especially when it’s security related, I can easily imagine something breaking in a minor release.

You’re using unsupported functionality that may break at any time, and you are using a managed database service that automatically updates. I don’t think you would have had a better time with any of the other cloud providers.

[hellcow]

It's not unsupported. It's literally documented by the MySQL project, existed for more than 5 years, was supported by Google, and continues to be supported by MySQL.

Google broke it without warning. That's a breaking change to your database, in production, 5 years after v5.7's release when you're fully locked in without so much as even a version bump.

Microsoft didn't do this. AWS didn't do this. Google did this.

Let this be a lesson to everyone that Google can and will break your critical production systems even years after they're operating perfectly, and they'll provide no warning, no explanation, and no fix.

[stingraycharles]

If it's specifically a change Google did, and upstream MySQL still supports this behavior, I'm inclined to agree with you that this is a surprise.

Having said that, it is worth emphasizing that you relied on unsupported / discouraged behavior that "is at your own risk". This isn't just any random feature Google disabled, it's security-related behavior that is discouraged to rely upon by MySQL themselves. This is a big caveat, and is something that I would never recommend anyone to do, especially not when you're planning on outsourcing the management + maintenance of your database.

[hrktb]

I still find it's an interesting aspect of using GCP. For instance I am no Postgres expert, and while I don't directly do anything fancy with it, I have no guarantee that some library I use doesn't rely on some "at your own risk" feature.

What this means is, while thorough testing can give confidence it works at some point, there is no real guarantee it will continue working even without any changes on our end.

[simonebrunozzi]

> Having said that, it is worth emphasizing that you relied on unsupported / discouraged behavior that "is at your own risk".

Absolutely this. GCP has no responsibility here.

[sjtindell]

Yeah regardless of these other points about the risk you took, the lack of response or initial communication is not good at all. Seems to be a pattern with Google. Sorry to hear you sunk so much time in chasing that change down.