Here’s some slightly unexpected (but definitely welcome) news from Oracle about MySQL, the widely used RDBMS. After Oracle acquired it in 2010, many in the open-source community were concerned about its future, which led to the creation of MariaDB, now widely adopted by major Linux distributions. But it now looks like the best may still be ahead for MySQL. Here’s why.
In a blog post on the official Oracle site, the company outlined a strategy to strengthen relationships with developers, contributors, and user groups. The company plans to publish clearer public roadmaps, encourage broader feedback, and provide more visible opportunities for community participation in development.
Oracle describes this as a new era of community engagement for MySQL, with plans to increase transparency, expand ecosystem collaboration, and emphasize the Community Edition.
A key part of the announcement is renewed innovation within MySQL Community Edition. Oracle stated that more developer-oriented features are planned, and that modern workload requirements, including observability enhancements and AI-related capabilities such as vector functions, are in active development.
Additionally, Oracle also plans to strengthen collaboration with Linux distributions and open-source projects, specifically mentioning closer work with Canonical and the Ubuntu community. Plus, the company reaffirmed its support for widely used open-source platforms built on MySQL, such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Joomla!.
This announcement comes as people are once again talking about how MySQL is managed. In recent years, PostgreSQL has gained significant momentum, becoming the default choice for many new projects due to its active development model, extensibility, and strong community branding.
Against that backdrop, parts of the MySQL ecosystem argue that attracting new deployments under the current governance structure has become increasingly challenging.
Soon after Oracle made its statement, a group of community members posted an open letter at 3306-db.org. They suggested establishing a nonprofit foundation independent of any vendor to guide and support MySQL development. The letter calls for greater transparency and broader participation in the ecosystem.
Just to remind you, MySQL Community Edition remains licensed under the GPL, while Oracle offers commercial editions with additional enterprise features. Finally, it remains to be seen whether this initiative will result in structural changes to development processes or feature delivery.
For more information, refer to Oracle’s announcement.
