The MySQL community wants Oracle to establish a foundation to ensure the future of the project

Members of the MySQL community are asking Oracle to set the stage for this project, with an open letter outlining several concerns affecting MySQL today.

“We see MySQL as a legacy technology, and we think that if we don’t take some steps, it could be at risk of becoming useless… We want to see growth, we want to see happiness, we want to see power,” said Vadim Tkachenko, founder of Percona and supporter of these efforts.

The open letter describes five main challenges facing MySQL today, and suggests three governance structures that could be adopted.

The first problem is that MySQL has been declining in popularity and market share, and PostgreSQL is becoming the default choice for new projects and small developers. The authors cite PostgreSQL’s active community, rich feature set and extensions, and strong product momentum as reasons for this.

MySQL lacks some features needed for modern workloads, such as native vector search, which are needed for AI use cases. “I think MySQL missed the AI ​​train, because any new system that might need AI, right now by default will use PostgreSQL,” said Tkachenko.

Next, the development of MySQL has taken place mostly “behind closed doors” and the community has limited insight into the roadmap and decision-making.

Another problem is that while it is possible to submit code to a project, it has historically been difficult for those contributions to be reviewed and integrated. “The process feels more like a suggestion box than a true collaboration,” the letter said.

Finally, the community is growing while at the same time not including the work of drawing new developers and students.

“To deal with these systemic problems, we propose the creation of a neutral, non-profit organization. This business will act as a shared ecosystem home, independent of the commercial interests of a single company. The foundation is not just a paper work; it is a functional structure, proven to address the above problems,” said the letter.

According to the book’s authors, having MySQL on the ground will remove barriers to contribution, rebuild transparency and trust, give competitors a place to work together on basic standards, and encourage adoption and advocacy.

Three different forms of governance are proposed in the book. The first is where Oracle takes the lead in establishing the foundation and maintains control over the direction and vision of MySQL while distributing the day-to-day work to maintainers.

The second option is for the industry to establish a foundation and Oracle to participate as a key board member and strategic partner.

A final option is for the community to organize an independent trade association that manages events, resource archives, and acquisition efforts.

According to Tkachenko, these options were developed with the idea of ​​giving Oracle a choice in its level of involvement in MySQL development going forward.

On the Oracle side of things, earlier this month, Frederic Descamps, MySQL community manager at Oracle, 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-centric features to the public system; expanding the ecosystem with new tools, frameworks, and connectors; and increasing transparency and encouraging more public participation.

Some of these improvements are already underway, such as important work being done on how key foreign barriers and cascades are managed. Other upcoming features under consideration include public binaries optimized for PGO, new vector functions for AI use cases, a hypergraph optimizer, and improvements to JSON binaries.

The team is also working on strengthening 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 the MySQL development guide and managing community contributions, including activity logs and bug reports.

“There is great potential in community-driven extensions, and we look forward to collaborating directly with those interested in building the next generation of MySQL tools and extensions,” Descamps wrote.

Tkachenko said the timing of their post could be coincidental, or it could be a response to recent community efforts such as the recent MySQL Community Summits in Brussels and San Francisco earlier this year.

“That tells us that Oracle is feeling pressure on this, and the promises they’re making are interesting, but to a large extent, they haven’t solved the original problem of Oracle being a tyrant,” he said. “We think the problem can only be fixed if this is a multi-vendor, neutral effort, not when Oracle decides what to do and how to do it, maybe more openly than before, which will be informed, but still not a multi-vendor effort.”