The Community Manager at Oracle (MySQL Community Manager) posted a note announcing changes in engineering guidelines, enhancing collaboration with the community, and accelerating the development of new features. The new MySQL development strategy includes three directions: implementing innovations and new features for developers in MySQL Community Edition; expanding the ecosystem and developing tools, frameworks, and connectors to improve work with MySQL; increasing transparency in processes and actively involving the community in defining the future direction of MySQL.
In MySQL Community Edition, there are plans to integrate capabilities that were previously available only in commercial products. Among the planned integrations are new vector functions for AI, creation of builds with PGO optimizations, a hypergraph optimizer, improvements in JSON handling, expansion of monitoring tools through OpenTelemetry, implementation of multi-threaded changes streaming from the transaction log, and provision of enhanced HA/DR (High Availability/Disaster Recovery) analytics. Some significant changes are already available in the MySQL 9.6 branch, where management of foreign keys and cascading actions (applying changes to related records via foreign keys) has been moved from the InnoDB storage engine to the SQL engine.
Additionally, there is an intention to enhance collaboration and alignment between the community and Oracle teams responsible for development, optimization, runtime, security, AI, quality control, and product management. Plans for development, progress reports, and bug fixes will be made publicly available, and the process of accepting changes from community participants will be simplified. To strengthen the ecosystem, close collaboration with Linux distributions and open projects is intended. Collaboration with Canonical and the Ubuntu community is mentioned specifically, as well as support for major open projects dependent on MySQL, such as WordPress, Drupal, Magento, and Joomla.
An open letter has been published on behalf of the community, signed by around 250 representatives from the community and companies using MySQL or developing alternative MySQL-based solutions. The letter calls on Oracle to create a non-profit organization to support the MySQL community, independent of individual vendors.
It is believed that moving development to a neutral platform will address existing systemic issues observed in recent years, such as the loss of MySQL market share, declining trust and transparency, barriers to incorporating changes from external contributors, lagging functionality (such as the absence of vector search), and a fragmented and aging community (lack of influx of new developers). Developing MySQL under the auspices of an independent organization will also attract major companies interested in MySQL's growth but currently hindered in their ability to participate in development due to it being conducted behind closed doors.
Several governance options for the new organization are proposed for discussion. For example, it is suggested that, similar to the formation of the OpenELA association, Oracle could create the organization and invite other industry leaders as co-founders, which would allow them to maintain control over the development strategy and ecosystem vision while engaging other participants in collaborative work.
Source: opennet.ru
