- Oracle lays out a “three-pronged strategy” to refresh its focus on MySQL
- There is a clear focus on community engagement and trust building
- MySQL’s roadmap is also set to be available for viewing
Oracle MySQL Community Manager Frederic Descamps has promised a “decisively new approach” to MySQL in response to concerns raised by the open source community.
Users have cited concerns over reduced commit activity, slow innovation, and a lack of transparency, and founder Michael Widenius has also previously stated that he was “devastated” by engineering job cuts.
But to mark MySQL’s 30th anniversary, Oracle is responding to criticism with a “renewed approach to community collaboration and innovation.”
Oracle promises “renewed” approach to MySQL
Descamps described MySQL as “one of the world’s most widely used open source databases,” and praised its “active and passionate community.” However, the community has been unhappy with certain elements under MySQL’s current management.
Oracle actually took ownership of MySQL when it bought the parent company for $7.4 billion in 2010.
Looking ahead, Oracle’s laid out a “three-pronged strategy” that includes moving previously commercial functions to Community Edition to drive innovation, expanding the ecosystem “by expanding tools, frameworks and connections” and improving transparency by publishing a development roadmap, sharing workloads and bug reports, and engaging more directly with the community.
PGO-optimized community binaries, new AI-focused vector functions, hypergraph optimization and JSON duality improvements are on the cards, with Oracle targeting April for its first round of updates to regain community trust.
Oracle also has plans to collaborate with popular open source projects like WordPress and Linux communities and distros, including Ubuntu/Canonical.
The news came at the annual preFOSDEM MySQL Belgian Days in Brussels, about a month after Oracle shared details of MySQL 9.6, which promises to address longstanding challenges with change tracking, binary log replication and data consistency.
To keep the community engaged, Oracle promises to bring more content to social media, YouTube and podcasts.
“As we look forward to the coming years, we are committed to executing this vision,” Descamps wrote.
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