The Community Engagement Officer at Oracle (MySQL Community Manager) published a note announcing a change in engineering leadership, increased collaboration with the community, and an acceleration in the development of new functionality. The new MySQL development strategy includes three directions: introducing innovations and new functionality for developers into MySQL Community Edition; expansion of the ecosystem and development of tools, frameworks and connectors to improve work with MySQL; increasing transparency of processes and active involvement of the community in determining the path of MySQL development.
MySQL Community Edition plans to integrate features previously available only in commercial products. Among the innovations planned for integration, new vector functions for AI, creation of assemblies with PGO optimizations, a hypergraph optimizer, improved quality of work with JSON, expansion of monitoring tools through OpenTelemetry, implementation of multi-threaded transfer of changes from the transaction log and provision of advanced analytics HA/DR (High Availability/Disaster Recovery). Some significant changes are already available in the MySQL 9.6 branch, in which the management of foreign keys and cascade actions (propagation of changes to other records linked through foreign keys).
In addition, there is an intention to increase collaboration and alignment between the community and Oracle teams responsible for development, optimization, runtime, security, AI, QA and product management. It is planned to make development plans, progress reports and bug fixes publicly available, as well as make it easier to accept changes from community members. To strengthen the ecosystem, we intend to establish close cooperation with Linux distributions and open source projects. Particularly mentioned is cooperation with Canonical and the Ubuntu community, as well as support for large open source projects that depend on MySQL, such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento and Joomla.
In response, an open letter was published on behalf of the community by open letter, which was signed by about 250 representatives of the community and companies using MySQL or developing alternative solutions on MySQL database. The letter calls on Oracle to create a non-profit organization to support the MySQL community, independent of individual vendors.