No end for MySQL: Features for Community Edition and more transparency
After massive staff cuts and a months-long development pause, Oracle promises a new beginning for MySQL – including enterprise features for the community.
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Oracle has announced a new strategy for the further development of MySQL. Under new leadership, numerous features from the Enterprise Edition are to be incorporated into the free Community Edition. With this step, Oracle is reacting to the sharp criticism from the MySQL community, which has been openly and increasingly discussing the presumed end of the database.
Three steps to community trust
The announcement comprises three core points: Firstly, developer-friendly features are to be integrated into the MySQL Community Edition; secondly, Oracle intends to expand the ecosystem with tools, frameworks, and interfaces. Thirdly, the company promises more transparency by publishing the development roadmap and facilitating community contributions via worklogs and bug reports.
Among the announced features to be moved from the commercial to the free edition are vector functions for AI applications (cosine, Euclidean distance, dot product), PGO-optimized binaries, the Hypergraph optimizer, and improvements to JSON Duality. Enhanced Triggers, OpenTelemetry observability, and a multi-threaded applier for high availability are also to follow. Some of these features are expected to be available as early as April 2026. A public webinar on the roadmap has been announced, but a specific date is still pending.
Oracle originally announced these steps at the preFOSDEM MySQL Belgian Days in Brussels. A current blog post from the group summarizes them for all interested users.
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Dramatic decline in development activity
The initiative comes against the backdrop of massive criticism of Oracle's MySQL course. In September 2025, the company laid off around 70 developers from the MySQL core team. Michael “Monty” Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, expressed himself “inconsolable” about the layoffs, but showed little surprise at Oracle's chosen path.
The consequences of the cutbacks are clearly visible in the code repository: for months, there have been hardly any commits in the mysql/mysql-server repository on GitHub. The number of active developers has decreased from a peak of 198 in 2006 to about 75 in 2025, according to Percona. Oracle had increasingly shifted development resources to the proprietary cloud database HeatWave.
Community discusses fork options
The uncertainty in the MySQL community led to concrete considerations about possible forks. At a meeting in San Francisco in mid-January 2026, organized by Percona and PlanetScale, developers discussed according to The Register various options – from a hard fork modeled after MariaDB to tracking forks like Percona Server, to the demand that Oracle transfer governance to a neutral community organization. An Oracle representative also attended the meeting.
The new strategy coincides with MySQL's 30th anniversary. Oracle acquired the database in 2009 through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
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