Announcing Vitess 22

This post announces Vitess 22.0.0 and Vitess Operator 2.15.0. It details query serving enhancements like query execution plan metrics, prepared statement caching, and GA for sharded views/atomic distributed transactions. Cluster management improvements include VTOrc enhancements for stalled disk recovery, errant GTID discovery, and semi-sync monitoring. The Kubernetes Operator now uses VTBackup pods for automated backups and supports Kubernetes 1.32. Performance gains are highlighted through gRPC codec upgrades, AST walk reduction, AST rewriting optimization, and merge-sort avoidance on single-shard queries.