As we mark the milestone of MySQL’s 30-year anniversary, the celebrations around the globe have been a testament to the widespread impact and popularity of the Dolphin. This week’s annual preFOSDEM MySQL Belgian Days in Brussels are not only an opportunity to celebrate, but also a chance for Oracle to share some key updates on a reinvigorated approach to community collaboration and innovation. Thanks to the consistent stewardship and leadership of Oracle, MySQL continues to stand as one of the world’s most widely used open source databases, strengthened at its core by an active and passionate community.
Oracle firmly believes that MySQL’s enduring strength arises from this vibrant global community. In the coming months, we are excited to announce that more features will be made available, accelerating innovation directly in the MySQL core. This renewed openness and pace of development can only succeed with thoughtful input and feedback from users and contributors. We invite you to help shape the next chapter of MySQL’s future.
Under new engineering leadership, we are embarking on a decisive new approach to MySQL development, with a clear vision for 2026 and beyond. Looking ahead to the coming years, we are committed to executing this vision with a focused three-pronged strategy. First, we will deliver innovation by introducing developer-focused features into the MySQL Community Edition. Second, we aim to extend and enrich the ecosystem by expanding tools, frameworks, and connectors that enhance the MySQL experience. Finally, we are increasing transparency and encouraging broader community participation, ensuring that more voices help guide MySQL’s evolution. Expect soon a public webinar announcement to discuss to roadmap with the Community and the MySQL Engineering Team and PMs.
So what does this new era mean for you, our users and contributors? You can expect to see exciting changes on the horizon, including the integration of features that were previously available only in commercial editions into the Community Edition. As we embark on this journey, our guiding principles remain: keeping a strong developer focus, empowering community contributions, building in active collaboration with users, and introducing low-risk, easy-to-adopt features first. Preserving MySQL’s exceptional stability and upgradeability is a top priority, and all new features will undergo thorough review with each release cycle.
Innovations for the MySQL Community Edition are already underway. For instance, we have significantly modernized how foreign key constraints and cascades are managed, shifting this responsibility to the SQL engine rather than InnoDB. This long-requested change directly addresses shared community needs, especially for those focused on change tracking and extensibility. This engineering milestone is just the beginning, with further enhancements on the way, such as improved triggers for cascading changes and foreign key enforcement for alternative storage engines. See the dedicated blog post.
Looking forward, some of the upcoming features under consideration will serve both developers and operational teams. Developers can anticipate PGO-optimized community binaries, new vector functions designed for AI use cases (such as cosine, euclidean, and dot product), the hypergraph optimizer, and improvements to JSON duality for better DML usability. On the operations side, enhanced observability and monitoring via OpenTelemetry, multi-threaded applier support, and advanced HA/DR analytics are among the highlights.
By April 2026, some of these innovations will be available, with more in the pipeline. We are also ramping up internal alignment and communication to ensure that our engineering, optimizer, runtime, security, QA, product management, and AI teams collaborate even more closely with the community. In line with our commitment to transparency, we will be publishing the development roadmap and facilitating contributions from the community—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.
We encourage users to connect with MySQL User Groups (MUGs), whether by creating new groups or engaging with established ones. Additionally, we are eager to support and expand MySQL’s presence in education—offering lectures, workshops, and hackathons and inviting anyone involved in the academic sector to reach out to us directly.
Our plans to strengthen the ecosystem also include close collaboration with Linux distributions and open source projects, with a particular focus on working with Canonical and the Ubuntu community. We will continue to support large open source products that rely on MySQL, like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Joomla!.
To keep everyone informed and engaged, we are creating more content for social media, our YouTube channel, and the Inside MySQL – Sakila Speaks podcast. We also moderate one of the largest LinkedIn Groups dedicated to MySQL, and are always available to assist the community on Slack and other forums. Efforts to recognize and grow the MySQL Rockstars and Oracle ACEs for MySQL continue, and we invite everyone to watch the MySQL Rockstars Ceremony in 2026.