Performance Analysis of MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 Upgrade and ORDER BY Optimization
After upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0, a client observed that ORDER BY queries on wide SELECTs became dramatically slower because MySQL 8.0 deprecated the max_length_for_sort_data setting, causing the optimizer to perform full‑field sorting instead of index‑based sorting; adding an index on the ordered column restores performance.