Stewardship of a community is easy for new and emerging technology. After 29 years, MySQL has become one of the most-used and trusted open-source databases by millions of users worldwide. Leadership of a community at this scale can be complex. We strive to find a balance of stability and innovation, provide a stable and predictable platform for customers, and create new features for technical users. Oracle consistently provides stewardship and leadership of the MySQL Community by investing in engineering, community and market adoption of the technology.

Here are a few examples to help you understand how MySQL moves forward technically amidst constantly expanding adoption. With the recent release of the brand-new version of MySQL: 9.0, it is an opportune time to look back and see how much has been achieved with MySQL 8, since first being released eight years ago.

Oracle continues to heavily invest in MySQL, the Community, Enterprise and Cloud Editions. In fact, many people are not aware that MySQL Community Edition is the heart of MySQL, and the source of our Enterprise and Cloud solutions. MySQL & HeatWave work in symbiosis. When MySQL is improved, by new features or bug fixes, HeatWave is improved on a continuous basis. And when MySQL needs to be modified or corrected for the HeatWave Database Service, this code also finds its way into MySQL, and the Community Edition simply benefits from these innovations in HeatWave. Of course, our Cloud offering differs from the on-premise version for technical reasons, which we’ll cover shortly, and for obvious business reasons to set us apart from the competition.  

Remember that the same teams of engineers develop both MySQL and our Cloud Service (HeatWave)! There are not 3 different branches of MySQL. There is MySQL (the Community Edition, Open Source), then some extra components and external products for MySQL Enterprise builds and finally HeatWave which is much more than MySQL (Analytics, Lakehouse, Machine Learning, GenAI) where all the magic happens in the cloud, on specific optimized machine as a secondary engine for MySQL.

Below is a short summary of what’s been achieved during the MySQL 8 cycle:

  • 8.0 is 467 contributions from the Community (422 accepted)
    Large companies are using MySQL and even contributing to it, for example for 8.0 we received:
    • 58 contibutions from Meta (previously Facebook)
    • 29 contributions from Booking.com
    • 17 contributions from Tencent
  • New data type for JSON with all the functions related to it
  • Instant DDLs (initiated from a contribution by Tencent Games)
  • Binlog compression
  • New InnoDB redo log design
  • Removal of offensive terms
  • Secure authentication plugin
  • New Volcano Iterator Executor for Optimizer (bringing EXPLAIN ANALYZE)
  • Hash Join
  • CLONE
  • a Giant Leap for SQL (Window Functions, CTE, JSON_TABLE, LATERAL, …)
  • Replication connection auto failover
  • Parallel InnoDB DDL threads
  • Invisible indexes and columns
  • GIPK mode
  • Telemery metrics in the code
  • …and much more!

Not to mention everything that was delivered in for on-premise architectures with the MySQL Shell’s AdminAPI (MySQL ReplicaSet, InnoDB Cluster, InnoDB ClusterSet, Read Replicas) and Router.  Don’t’ forget the transparent Read/Write Splitting, a long-awaited feature that has been released recently.

Listening to feedback from our Community users and customers, we have also modified our release cycle to adopt and support MySQL LTS. This was also a large effort from our engineering teams and we also worked on the usual challenges related to bug fixes, performance regressions and more…

  • Fixes for security, stability, and preparation for cloud and multi-cloud environments
  • The MySQL Teams (Verification, Development, Documentation) processed 16,841 bugs for MySQL 8 and fixed 15,894 of them! (The rest of them were not bugs, duplicates, still processing, …)
  • 288 Work Logs were completed for the LTS release.
  • We rolled back some changes int the C API and worked closely with the Ubuntu Team for them to include MySQL 8.4 LTS
  • The team fixed 11 performance regressions for the 8.4 LTS

Community

At the center of all these improvements and new features is the MySQL Community.  Many of these innovations are also jointly led by our collaboration with our customers and community users. For example, the implementation of dual passwords support was made for request by Booking.com (and many other requests).

And we do the same in the cloud. When these bugs appeared and were reproducible in our service, with very specific load of our customers, the fixes are, of course, also pushed into the Community Edition. Our teams are discovering bugs even before our customers notice them and we fix them. The MySQL Heatwave service has intermediate minor releases to handle those bugs.

For example, the bug related to running queries against a table with a multi-value index, that forced the server to sometimes exit unexpectedly, often while executing a complex SELECT query which used this index, was discovered by our Ops team in our cloud and was fixed in 8.0.37 and 8.4.0. We found and fixed a dozen of such bugs recently that were discovered in our cloud and not reported by customers or community users.

MySQL User Groups are active all over the world, and the MySQL Community team supports them to find locations, speakers and topics for discussion and to help promote and grow their communities.

We created a category of specialization within the Oracle ACE Program to recognize members of the MySQL Community. The program rewards and promotes individuals for their personal contributions to the Oracle community.

The Community Team recognizes excellence through the MySQL Rockstars Awards. The award is given to community members who have contributed their work, enthusiasm and energy to the promotion of MySQL over the past year.

The MySQL Community Team also hosts a North America and Belgium Summit regularly.

Visit the following pages to find out more about MySQL community and engagement:

Oracle’s commitment and investment in MySQL is substantial, balancing customers desire for stability and engineers desire for innovation and new features. We continue work to secure the platform, fix bugs, enhance performance and prepare MySQL for multi cloud environments to ensure inoperability and choice.

We look forward to hearing from you, the MySQL community, about your favorite innovations in 8.0. We strive to find a balance of stability and innovation, provide a stable and predictable platform for customers, and create new features for technical users.

Oracle’s stewardship and leadership of the MySQL Community through our continued investments in engineering, community and market adoption of the technology will ensure the success of MySQL for future generations.

Another demonstration of the importance of our Community is the latest version released on July 23rd. This was an off-cycle release addressing a significant bug reported by community users. Please upgrade to 8.0.39, 8.4.2 or 9.0.1.