- Oracle establishes ‘three-pronged strategy’ to renew focus on MySQL
- There is a clear focus on community engagement and building trust.
- The MySQL roadmap will also be available for viewing
Frederic Descamps, Oracle MySQL Community Manager, has promised a “decisive new approach” to MySQL in response to concerns raised by the open source community.
Users have cited concerns about reduced engagement activity, slow innovation, and a lack of transparency, with founder Michael Widenius also previously stating that he was “heartbroken” by the engineering job cuts.
But to mark MySQL’s 30th anniversary, Oracle is responding to criticism with a “reinvigorated approach to community collaboration and innovation.”
Oracle promises ‘reinvigorated’ approach to MySQL
Descamps described MySQL as “one of the most widely used open source databases in the world,” and praised its “active and passionate community.” However, the community is unhappy with certain elements under MySQL’s current leadership.
Oracle effectively took ownership of MySQL when it acquired its parent company for $7.4 billion in 2010.
Looking ahead, Oracle has established a “three-pronged strategy” that includes moving previously commercial-only features to the Community Edition to drive innovation, expanding the ecosystem “by expanding tools, frameworks, and connectors,” and improving transparency by publishing a development roadmap, sharing workloads and bug reports, and engaging with the community more directly.
PGO-optimized community binaries, new AI-focused vector functions, hypergraph optimizer, and JSON duality improvements are all on the cards, and Oracle is targeting April for its first round of updates to regain community trust.
Oracle has also set plans to collaborate with popular open source projects such as WordPress and Linux communities and distributions, including Ubuntu/Canonical.
The news came at the annual pre-FOSDEM Belgian MySQL Days in Brussels, about a month after Oracle shared details of MySQL 9.6, which promises to solve long-standing challenges with change tracking, binary log replication, and data consistency.
To keep the community engaged, Oracle promises to bring more content to social media, YouTube, and podcasts.
“Looking ahead to the coming years, we are committed to executing this vision,” Descamps wrote.
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