It is not uncommon for multiple releases to remain under support, especially for security updates. This is no different than Windows OS, Mac OS, PHP, Apache, etc.

Features are not being added to MySQL 5.7. That is what would be unusual.

Hi spamjim,

Thanks for your reply. Reason I asked this is because I am having problems/issues with MySQL 8.0.31.

There is this kinda unpredictable behaviour when I ran my VFP apps. Some error occasionally pops up.

This is the thread I posted in MySQL:

https://forums.mysql.com/read.php?103,705572,70564...

This never happens in MySQL 5.7.40.

I'm not fully awake to yet process the details of your "number of attributes" issue but at a groggy level I would be worried about connections of ancient VFP technology with modern releases of MySQL and the ODBC connectors. That is part of the reason why something like MySQL 5.7 is still being maintained. There is a lot of custom development still depending on it.

You might also look at MariaDB, the more openly licensed successor/fork to MySQL. The modern MariaDB release might be more backward compatible than MySQL.