Oracle values the MySQL community. MySQL is fundamental to our data strategy. Oracle firmly believes that MySQL’s enduring strength arises from this vibrant global community. We are excited to work with the MySQL Community on the strategy we announced in Belgium, January 29, 2026, including adding more features and functionality, accelerating innovation directly in the MySQL core.
This renewed openness and pace of development will succeed with thoughtful input and feedback from users and contributors. The feedback, ideas, and experiences shared in this community continue to shape our direction and strengthen the impact of our work. We are deeply committed to maintaining an open, transparent dialogue as we evolve and improve MySQL together with a clear vision for 2026 and beyond and a community 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 and adoption. Finally, we are increasing transparency and encouraging broader community participation, ensuring that more voices help shape MySQL’s evolution.
As we previously announced in our blog post “MySQL Community Roadmap Webinar”, we hosted the MySQL Community Roadmap Discussion webinar on Feb 25, 2026 with Heather VanCura (VP) and Jason Wilcox (SVP). Building on the momentum from Brussels—where we welcomed our newly awarded MySQL Rockstars at the MySQL Belgian Days (January, Brussels)—we continued the conversation with 159 attendees joining from around the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, France, Germany, China, and many more.
A roadmap built with the community
The webinar focused on a future MySQL Community roadmap intended to be public and developed with the MySQL Community, including new feature requests evaluated based on roadmap fit. As always, roadmap direction is shared for information purposes and is not a commitment to deliver specific features on a fixed schedule.
What’s changing: accelerating innovation while increasing transparency
We outlined our renewed approach centered on delivering more innovation into MySQL Community Edition, growing the ecosystem, and increasing transparency and community participation—using a phased plan that starts with existing tools and expands over time. A key message: some capabilities that were previously limited to commercial offerings are planned to become available in Community Edition, while preserving MySQL’s stability and upgradeability.
How features are prioritized
The roadmap discussion emphasized community feature selection principles:
- Start with low-risk, easy-to-adopt capabilities
- Preserve stability and upgradeability
- Re-evaluate priorities in every release cycle
Potential upcoming feature highlights
We shared a set of potential feature highlights under consideration:
- For developers: PGO-optimized community binaries, vector functions (with a request for more feedback before inclusion), the hypergraph optimizer, and JSON duality improvements focused on DML usability.
- For operations: OpenTelemetry for modern observability, plus multi-threaded applier and flow-control metrics to enhance HA/DR analytics.
Some innovations may arrive as soon as April 2026.
Roadmap themes
We also proposed roadmap categories to help guide discussion and prioritization, and how we will incorporate innovation into the MySQL Community Edition including:
AI & cloud alignment, such as vector, developer experience and developer focused features, performance, such as scaling, observability, extensibility, and ecosystem/tooling/connectors.
Increasing transparency and making it easier to participate
We outlined initial Phase 1 actions focused on clearer visibility and community feedback loops, including:
- Track feature requests via the bugs database, triaging them against the published community roadmap.
- Open selected worklogs and improve transparency mechanisms
- Improve bug triage engagement and status updates in the community bugs database.
- Streamline publishing selected security bugs once fixes are released.
- Publish early development releases (EA) to gather developer feedback (for development purposes only).
Community feedback
During the webinar, we also ran a live poll on Feb 25 to capture real-time community priorities. Based on the poll results—together with the Q&A feedback and discussion—participants reinforced the importance of strong communication around feature requests, clear contribution pathways (including discussion and publishing workflows), and continued investment in community activities and transparency mechanisms. We also talked about adding and expanding the MySQL Community events—including conferences and meetups where the MySQL Community team sponsors, presents, and connects with users and contributors, making it easier for community members to find us, share feedback in person, and learn what’s coming next. We will use this input to help shape how we run future sessions and how we improve our contribution and feedback process.
Next public discussion
We’re also announcing our next public MySQL Community Roadmap discussion for March 23 at 10:00 AM PT. A separate announcement with registration details and agenda will follow.
Planet MySQL: planned improvements as part of the roadmap
We also highlighted that Planet MySQL is key to growing the overall MySQL Ecosystem and adoption. Planet MySQL is another important aspect of our community engagement improvements will continue to be an important community hub for aggregating MySQL content and encouraging knowledge sharing. As part of the broader roadmap and engagement work, we’re proposing several enhancements to improve inclusivity and discoverability, including:
- Revising the backend filtering process to address concerns about restrictive filtering
- A community content submission portal to make it easier to suggest blogs/posts for inclusion
- A showcase for MySQL ecosystem projects and tools (highlighting third-party tools and projects)
- Better search and filtering, plus an event calendar and announcements
- Integration of a developer contribution guide for those who want to participate more directly
How to get involved
There are many ways to participate: share ideas and feedback, engage with or start a MySQL User Group (MUG), and connect with us on MySQL in Education for lectures, workshops, and hackathons . If you’re looking for a simple starting point, our recent post “Top Ways to Engage with the MySQL Community” reinforces the Community Team’s focus on making participation easier through clear paths to learn, connect, and contribute—supported by predictable processes and visible places to meet, learn, and share. We also encourage community members to help us grow the broader ecosystem—through content, events, and community channels—and to follow along as we expand Planet MySQL with proposed improvements such as updated filtering, community content submission, clearer contribution guidance, better search and filtering, and an event calendar for announcements . Finally, we closed by sharing links and resources for community participation so it’s easier to find the right place to plug in and stay connected: