Percona Server for MongoDB 8.3 is now available as a Technical Preview (not for production). It skips 8.1 and 8.2, delivering three minor releases worth of improvements at once. Key highlights include the Cost-Based Ranker (CBR) as the default query plan selector, WiredTiger cache sizing as a percentage of available memory (especially useful for Kubernetes deployments), faster initial sync, faster time-series bulk inserts, and groundwork for upcoming full-text and vector search capabilities. The post details important breaking changes: geospatial index rebuilding may be required, error codes have changed, $text sorted-by-score queries now have a 100 MB cap, and pre-epoch date arithmetic shifts by one second. Adoption telemetry shows PSMDB 8.0 now accounts for ~47.6% of active instances, up from 22.6% a year ago. For production use, 8.0.26-11 remains the recommended version until 8.3 reaches GA.
