Database Engine & Client Release Tracking
Engine point releases, extension compatibility, driver versions and the upgrade paths between major versions.
Databases are upgraded less often than anything else in a stack and with more caution, which changes what is worth tracking. Nobody needs an alert for every patch release of an engine they run in production; they need to know which patch release fixes the corruption bug in the branch they are on, and which major version their current one stops receiving fixes.
The second thing that matters is the surrounding ecosystem. A database major version is not usable until the extensions, drivers and managed-hosting providers have caught up, and those lag by weeks or months. Tracking engine releases without tracking driver and extension compatibility gives you half the picture and the wrong half.
What this category tracks
- Engine releases
- Major and point releases for relational, document, key-value and time-series database engines.
- Client drivers and connectors
- Language-specific driver releases and the engine versions they support.
- Extension and plugin updates
- Releases of widely used engine extensions and their compatibility windows.
- Version support lifecycles
- End-of-life dates for major engine versions and the branches still receiving backported fixes.
What matters most here
Backported fixes are why the version support lifecycle matters more here than almost anywhere else. Engine projects maintain several major versions in parallel, backporting critical fixes to each supported branch. Knowing which branch you are on and how long it remains supported determines whether a critical fix will reach you at all — the fix ships to supported branches only, and an unsupported branch simply never receives it.
Where this data comes from
- Official engine release announcements and version support policies
- Project repository release tags and changelogs
- Driver and connector release feeds
- Managed-hosting provider version availability notices
Every indexed entry links to its primary source. See our editorial and sourcing policy for what we verify and what we do not.
Common questions
Why do you record end-of-life dates as deadlines?
Because they behave like deadlines. Nothing is published on the day support ends, so unless the date is stored as a dated event ahead of time it passes unnoticed. Filing it as a deadline means it appears in a chronological view alongside everything else that has a date attached.
Do you cover managed cloud database services?
Their version availability announcements, yes — the point at which a provider makes a new engine version available is a distinct and often much later event than the upstream release.
Tracked releases in Databases
The live release list for this category loads below.