As part of our MySQL community engagement plan, which includes delivering new features into MySQL Community Edition, increasing collaboration and transparency, and expanding and growing the MySQL Ecosystem, we have created a new rhythm of public MySQL Community Discussions—starting with our first session on February 25 and continuing with our second session on March 23, and our third session on April 21. These conversations brought together community members from across regions and roles (developers, DBAs, operators, architects, and contributors) to help shape a clearer, more transparent view of where we’re heading and how the community can engage. Our next public discussion in May will focus on how we will expand community contributions to MySQL.

One consistent theme came through in those sessions: moving faster on meaningful innovation while increasing transparency and creating clearer paths for community feedback and participation.

With the Release 9.7.0 of MySQL Community Edition this week, this is an opportunity to reflect on increased transparency, community engagement, and innovation. This includes the delivery of new features and functionality, early publication of select worklogs, early access releases, increased transparency in bug tracking and resolution (including CVE publications), the creation of community metrics, and plans to expand MySQL Community and ecosystem activities—such as Planet MySQL expansion, as well as increased public discussions and industry and community events.

As a follow-up, we’ve consolidated themes and priorities of the roadmap into a simple, community-focused roadmap view and updated the newly introduced MySQL Developer Guide with a section focused on submitting of new feature requests.

MySQL Community Roadmap Themes

The roadmap image below reflects the primary categories we discussed with the community. As always, this roadmap is shared for planning and discussion purposes—it is not a commitment to deliver specific features on a fixed schedule. Priorities are expected to evolve as we evaluate roadmap fit, technical readiness, and community input across quarterly release cycles.

The following design principles will be kept in mind when adding new features.

  • Low-risk, easy to adopt features will be prioritized, and come first
  • Preserve MySQL quality, stability, and upgradeability
  • Review features at every release cycle

AI And Cloud Alignment

This theme reflects feedback around modern workloads and developer expectations—especially for applications incorporating AI-driven search and similarity use cases, and for MySQL deployments operating at cloud scale.

Developer And DBA Experience

A recurring message from the community: improving day-to-day usability matters, and “developer-focused” features should be easier to adopt and integrate into existing workflows.

Extensibility And Ecosystem

A healthy ecosystem depends on great integration points and modern tooling. This category includes work aimed at making MySQL easier to extend, observe, and integrate into cloud-native environments.

Performance And Observability

Performance and operational insight remain core priorities. This theme reflects ongoing work to help users tune, debug, and operate MySQL confidently at scale.

Across these categories, our approach remains consistent with what we shared in the roadmap discussions: prioritize capabilities that are low-risk and easy to adopt, preserve quality, stability and upgradeability, and re-evaluate priorities every release cycle based on fit, readiness, and feedback.

From Roadmap Discussion to Deeper Technical Collaboration

Public roadmap conversations are essential. We also heard strong interest in going deeper technically with the people who build, review, and maintain MySQL features and ecosystem components.

That’s why we’re hosting a focused technical collaboration event to discuss how we will collaborate and contribute together to shape the future of MySQL.

MySQL Contributor Summit (May 26, 2026)

We’re pleased to announce the MySQL Contributor Summit, taking place on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, at Oracle’s Executive Briefing Center in Redwood Shores, California. This is a hybrid meeting focused on bringing together experienced MySQL engineers, developers, and community contributors for in-depth technical collaboration.

The Summit is designed as a technical working session to:

  • discuss upcoming roadmap-aligned development projects, and
  • explore opportunities for collaboration across the MySQL ecosystem.

This event is intended for deeply technical development discussions related to MySQL Community Edition.

We will also hold an online design meeting session the week before the Contributor Summit to review the RoadMap and features identified for discussion.

Thank You—And Keep the Feedback Coming

Thank you to everyone who joined the public discussions, asked questions, and shared candid feedback. These sessions are helping us strengthen the loop between community needs, technical priorities, and delivery planning.

More updates will follow as we continue the public discussions and expand opportunities to contribute, test, validate, and refine features earlier—so community feedback can shape MySQL in a practical, measurable way.

If you have a community topic you’d like us to cover in an upcoming public session, or a technical proposal you’d like to bring to the Contributor Summit, please let us know. We plan to arrange ongoing public discussions, quarterly contributor summits, design meetings, and MySQL Community conferences to share and grow together.

See also