Devs begin to assess options for MySQL's future beyond Oracle
Developers in the MySQL community are working together to challenge Oracle to improve transparency and commitment in its handling of the popular open source database, while considering other options, including forking the code.
At a meeting in San Francisco earlier this month, a group of interested members of the MySQL community met to discuss recent concerns about the handling of the system upon which many had built companies and careers.
Recent job losses at Oracle's MySQL core development team — the database's founding developer Michael "Monty" Widenius said he was "heartbroken" on hearing the news — and a dramatically falling number of commits to the project have led some to believe it is reaching a critical crossroads.
Vadim Tkachenko previously worked for MySQL AB, the Swedish company that developed the database before it was bought by Sun Microsystems, which later merged with Oracle. Now CTO at open source consultancy Percona, Tkachenko told The Register that MySQL was at a fork in the road under Oracle's management, with the developer community now having to choose its future: either under Oracle or as part of a different model.
Peter Zaitsev, Percona co-founder and MySQL performance expert, said Oracle's treatment of MySQL was like the metaphor of boiling a frog: the critical point for MySQL might not be understood until it is too late.
"They are moving more and more features to their cloud and enterprise software, and then they have been reducing MySQL staff, but they have not done anything drastic. The result for the MySQL community, though, is not great. It's not really getting MySQL developed to its full potential," he said.
In response, a group of developers got together in the US to discuss potential options for the future of MySQL. The group included engineers from Percona and PlanetScale, which has built a database service around Vitess, a distributed MySQL-based database.
Sam Lambert, PlanetScale co-founder and CEO, said: "MySQL is critical to the functioning of the web and powers millions of products. PlanetScale is committed to its future. We maintain our own fork of MySQL... We will always back MySQL as a technology and use our engineering resources to ensure its health. It's our hope that we can do this as part of an open and flourishing community."
The group meeting was not specifically meant for users, but more for developers who contributed code and companies built around open source MySQL. A representative from Oracle also attended, Zaitsev said.
"I appreciate they actually did that, because it was obviously not an event where they're going to get a lot of love, so that's good they came," he said.
The options on the table were leaving the governance of MySQL with Oracle or creating a fork of the open source database for a community to develop and govern. Such a fork could either be a hard fork or a tracking fork, Zaitsev explained.
A hard fork is exemplified by MariaDB, which Widenius forked in 2009. The database remains open source, governed by a foundation, and is linked to a separate company, MariaDB plc. It has developed separately from MySQL since it was forked.
Zaitsev said Percona's Server for MySQL, which the company says offers enterprise-grade features in open source packaging, is an example of a tracking fork. "We apply certain patches, and certain other changes, but we are always tracking that [against MySQL]. A tracking fork typically brings more compatibility than a hard fork, far more compatible with MySQL compared with MariaDB," he said.
The group plans further meetings, including one focused on developers in Europe, set to be held around the Open Source Conference Fosdem 26. Fosdem is happening in Brussels over the last weekend of January. It might take further feedback before deciding the best way forward.
The open source community has a track record of wresting control of projects by forking code from vendor-associated systems. For example, the Linux Foundation launched Valkey in 2024, forking code from popular cache/database Redis. It was backed by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap, as well as Percona.
Zaitsev said the MySQL group had spoken to major cloud vendors in the US and elsewhere, as well as smaller cloud companies.
He told us: "A lot of them have their customers [that] are feeling the pain from missing features in MySQL, like vector search for example. But I'm not going to disclose any kind of commitment before it goes official."
Whatever the outcome, it's likely there is strong feeling in the MySQL developer community that Oracle's recent approach merits a response. The Register asked Oracle to comment. ®
