This summer, MySQL Community conversations continued across JAPAC through a series of in-person events.
Heather VanCura, Vice President of External Standards & Community Engagement at Oracle, visited MySQL communities in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to meet with user groups, developers, customers, universities, media, and open source community leaders.
The goal was simple: listen, learn, and collaborate.
Community Conversations Across Japan, Korea, and Taiwan
The JAPAC tour continued the conversations started through the MySQL Public Discussion series and the first MySQL Contributor Summit.
Across the region, community members shared feedback on MySQL Community Edition, roadmap transparency, contribution paths, GitHub collaboration, governance, and future feature development.
In Japan, the MySQL User Group Japan / MyNA community hosted a meetup focused on MySQL Community engagement, feedback from the Contributor Summit, and perspectives from the local community. The visit also included a community roundtable with AWS, media interviews, and a visit to a local science and technology institute hosted by Hokkaido Java User Group leader and Professor Hiroto Yamakawa.
In Korea, Heather met with the MySQL community, customers, and media to discuss the next phase of MySQL Community participation, including open governance, GitHub-based collaboration, the Community Roadmap, and MySQL 9.7 LTS.
In Taiwan, the tour concluded with a joint user group event focused on MySQL updates, community collaboration, and future opportunities for participation. Due to severe weather, the event was held online.
Together, these events showed that community engagement extends beyond online discussions. In-person conversations remain an important way to understand local priorities, build trust, and create stronger connections between Oracle engineering, community leaders, and MySQL users.
From Transparency to Participation
A consistent theme throughout the tour was that transparency remains important, but participation is what turns feedback into meaningful action.
Recent MySQL Community efforts focus on making it easier for users and contributors to follow the roadmap, share feedback, submit feature requests, join technical discussions, and participate earlier in the development process.
Media discussions in Korea also reflected this shift. Several articles highlighted Oracle’s plans to expand MySQL Community participation through a more open governance model, clearer contributor roles, GitHub collaboration, and broader engagement across the ecosystem, including AWS and Google Cloud.
The goal is not only to share more information, but to create practical ways for the community to contribute ideas, feedback, testing, documentation, feature proposals, and code.
Governance, GitHub, and the Community Roadmap
Governance was a recurring topic throughout the JAPAC tour.
The new MySQL governance model defines clearer roles for contributors, committers, project leads, the Technical Steering Committee, and vulnerability-related work. It provides community members with more visible and structured ways to participate while preserving the quality, security, compatibility, and stability that MySQL users expect.
GitHub is also becoming the central place for collaboration. The MySQL Community GitHub repository, Discussions, Issues, Wiki, and Roadmap help connect community feedback, feature requests, design ideas, and follow-up actions in a more visible way.
These efforts support a discussion-first approach: sharing ideas, gathering feedback, refining proposals, and moving toward implementation where appropriate.
AI, Vector, MCP, and Future MySQL Innovation
The JAPAC discussions also reflected strong interest in the future technical direction of MySQL, especially around AI-era database requirements.
AI and cloud alignment, performance, observability, extensibility, and developer experience are important areas of the MySQL Community Roadmap. During the Korea media briefing, AI-related priorities such as native vector support, vector indexing, and MCP integration were highlighted as key areas of focus.
As AI agents, RAG applications, and real-time data-driven systems continue to evolve, MySQL Community Edition is well positioned to support modern application development while maintaining the reliability, stability, and broad compatibility that users depend on.
Regional Feedback Matters
The JAPAC tour reinforced the important role that regional communities play in shaping the future of MySQL.
Community members in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan shared practical feedback, technical questions, feature ideas, and a strong interest in contributing more directly to MySQL’s future.
These conversations connect local experience with global roadmap discussions and demonstrate how user groups, developer communities, and regional leaders help bring real-world use cases and ideas into the broader MySQL ecosystem.
The next step is to continue integrating feedback from Public Discussions, GitHub, user groups, Contributor Summits, and regional community events into a more structured and actionable collaboration process.
The Conversation Continues
The MySQL Community has always grown through collaboration.
Code contributions are important, but they are only one part of the picture. Testing, documentation, bug reports, benchmarking, feature requests, design feedback, production experience, education, and community leadership all help strengthen MySQL.
The JAPAC tour was another step in connecting with the people who use, support, teach, extend, and contribute to MySQL every day.
The conversation does not end here. Community engagement activities are planned for LAD and EMEA, creating more opportunities to listen, learn, and collaborate with MySQL users, contributors, and community leaders across more regions.
Thank you to everyone who joined the events in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, shared feedback, asked questions, and helped move the conversation forward.
Oracle and the MySQL Community are building the future of MySQL together.
Related Media Coverage
The JAPAC community engagement tour also generated media coverage in Korea and Japan, highlighting MySQL Community participation, open governance, GitHub collaboration, the Community Roadmap, AI/vector priorities, and regional community engagement.
- ZDNet Korea: Oracle expands MySQL open governance, with AI and vector support as roadmap priorities
- Digital Daily: Database competition intensifies in the AI era as Oracle accelerates MySQL open governance
- ETNews: Oracle expands MySQL community participation and strengthens the open source ecosystem
- CodeZine Japan: MySQL Community transformation initiatives to promote ecosystem co-creation