Oracle has announced a new governance model for MySQL, including a technical steering committee and community contributor roles. The move follows months of pressure from the MySQL community. However, the OurSQL Foundation, which formed to flag the issues users have, says Oracle has yet to make binding commitments about who truly controls the database’s future.
Concerns over MySQL’s governance existed already when Oracle decided to lay off much of the core MySQL team, chronicled at the time by The Register. This eventually culminated in the formation of the OurSQL Foundation in May, an independent body representing the interests of MySQL users and developers, backed by organizations including Percona, PlanetScale, PingCAP, and Alibaba.
The governance changes include new contributor roles, public roadmap discussions, Contributor Summits, GitHub-based collaboration, and Early Access releases. Experienced contributors can take on “committer” responsibilities, helping to review changes and maintain code quality.
Major cloud players included, but not Microsoft
The initial technical steering committee will include AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, with additional representation from yet-to-be-named MySQL users. One notable omission is Microsoft, which provides Azure Database for MySQL as a DBaaS offering. Why it is not among the founding members is unclear, although we won’t speculate on that.
“Stronger governance gives the MySQL community clearer ways to participate and accelerate innovation while preserving the quality, security, and compatibility users expect,” said Jason Wilcox, senior vice president, Data and AI Platform Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Community says promises fall short
Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Percona and a co-founder of the OurSQL Foundation, welcomed Oracle’s shift in tone but flagged that the announcements stop short of binding commitments. “For the last nine months, Oracle has shown a desire to show more openness to the community in terms of sharing and including the wider community in the decision-making process. This is all great.” Nevertheless, he notes that Oracle’s positioning of the community in an “advisory” role is “not really PostreSQL-type community engagement, where community is really able to plot a path forward for users.” Without anything binding, Zaitsev says he is concerned about potential proposals to change the database not being accepted by Oracle when it is not in their strategic, commercial interest to do so.
As Techzine reported in February, MySQL’s stagnation has given PostgreSQL ground to gain, particularly through its pgvector extension suited to AI workloads. There will continue to be suprising winners and losers at all parts of the tech stack with the AI-induced shake-ups since the past few years. There’s no reason to suggest databases are any different.