Members of the MySQL community are calling on Oracle to establish a foundation for the project, with an open letter that lays out a few pressing concerns affecting MySQL today.
“We see MySQL kind of becoming a legacy technology, and we think if we don’t take some steps, it risks becoming irrelevant … We want to see growth, we want to see excitement, we want to see energy,” said Vadim Tkachenko, co-founder of Percona and supporter of these efforts.
The open letter describes five main challenges that MySQL is facing today, and proposes three potential governance structures that could be adopted.
The first issue is that MySQL has been declining in popularity and market share, with PostgreSQL becoming a default choice for newer projects and younger developers. The authors cite PostgreSQL’s active community, rich feature set and extensions, and strong brand momentum as reasons for this.
MySQL lacks some of the features that are needed for modern workloads, such as native vector search, which is required for AI use cases. “I think MySQL has missed the AI train, because any new application that would require AI, currently by default would use PostgreSQL,” said Tkachenko.
Next, development of MySQL has largely happened “behind closed doors” and the community has limited visibility into the roadmap and decision-making.
Another issue is that while it’s possible to submit code to the project, it has historically been difficult to get those contributions reviewed and merged. “The process feels more like a suggestion box than a genuine collaboration,” the letter states.
Finally, the community is getting older while at the same time not putting in the work to draw in new developers and students.
“To address these systemic issues, we propose the formation of a vendor-neutral, non-profit Foundation. This entity would serve as a shared home for the ecosystem, independent of any single company’s commercial interests. A Foundation isn’t just paperwork; it is a practical, proven structure to fix the issues above,” the letter states.
According to the authors of the letter, having MySQL under a foundation would remove barriers to contribution, rebuild transparency and trust, provide a place for competitors to collaborate on the core standard, and drive adoption and advocacy.
Three separate governance models have been proposed in the letter. The first is one in which Oracle takes the lead in establishing the foundation and keeps control of the direction and vision of MySQL while distributing day-to-day work to maintainers.
The second option is to have the industry establish the foundation and have Oracle participate as a principal board member and strategic partner.
The final option is to have the community organize an independent trade association that manages events, resource repositories, and adoption efforts.
According to Tkachenko, these options were developed with the idea to give Oracle a choice in its level of involvement in MySQL development going forward.
From Oracle’s side of things, earlier this month, Frederic Descamps, community manager for MySQL at Oracle, had published a blog post detailing upcoming changes the company was planning to make to improve community engagement.
The company’s three-pronged approach includes introducing new developer-focused features in the community edition; expanding the ecosystem with new tools, frameworks, and connectors; and increasing transparency and encouraging more community participation.
Some of these improvements are already in progress, such as significant work being done on how foreign key constraints and cascades are managed. Other upcoming features being considered include PGO-optimized community binaries, new vector functions for AI use cases, a hypergraph optimizer, and improvements to JSON duality.
The team is also working on bolstering its internal alignment and communication to ensure better collaboration with the community from its engineering, optimizer, runtime, security, QA, product management, and AI teams. It will be publishing MySQL’s development roadmap and facilitate community contributions, including worklogs and bug reports.
“There is great potential in community-driven extensibility, and we look forward to partnering directly with those interested in building the next generation of MySQL tools and extensions,” Descamps wrote.
Tkachenko said that the timing of their post may be a coincidence, or it may be a response to recent community efforts like recent MySQL Community Summits in Brussels and San Francisco at the beginning of the year.
“That tells us that Oracle feels some pressure in this regard, and the promises they make are kind of interesting, but to a big extent, they still do not solve the primary problem of Oracle being a dictatorship,” he said. “We think the problem can only be fixed if this is a multi-vendor, neutral effort, not one where Oracle decides what to do and how to do it, maybe more openly than before, which will be appreciated, but it is still not a multi-vendor effort.”
