What Happened at the Summits
We just wrapped up two MySQL Community Summits – one in San Francisco in January, and one in Brussels right before FOSDEM. The energy in the rooms: a lot of people who care deeply about MySQL got together, exchanged ideas, and left with a clear sense that we need to act.
The goal was to gather the people who care about MySQL, have an open exchange of ideas, and leave with action points. We had end users, contributors, and vendors all in the same room, all agreeing on one thing: MySQL matters, and we all want MySQL to grow in popularity, not to follow a trajectory of decline.
Where MySQL Stands Today
MySQL is declining in popularity. PostgreSQL has become the default choice for new projects. MySQL is at genuine risk of becoming irrelevant if we don’t do something about it. That said, the existing installation base is massive – MySQL still powers a huge portion of the internet.
And there’s a good reason for that. MySQL remains the best OLTP database for massive scale. It’s online all the time, simple to deploy and manage, and – as Geir Høydalsvik put it – it lets operators sleep at night. Those are not small things.
What Got Us Here
In autumn 2025, Oracle moved MySQL to OCI and followed up with significant layoffs. Staff was cut by roughly 50%, and key competence was lost. The remaining engineers are now expected to develop cloud services.
Oracle brought in new leadership – Jason Wilcox as SVP Data Services – and recently has been signaling a shift toward prioritizing community over direct revenue.
Oracle has also announced some promising things for MySQL 9.7 LTS, expected in April 2026: vector functions in the community edition, the Hypergraph optimizer enabled by default, JSON Duality with full DML support, and PGO-optimized binaries for performance. They’ve talked about improving the contribution process – public proposal discussions, better feedback on rejected patches, opening security bugs after fixes are released, and moving enterprise features to community edition.
These are all welcome steps. And just last week, Oracle published a blog post promising a “new era” of MySQL community engagement. The community understandably remains skeptical, the resource allocation questions remain unanswered, and what we really need is verification through action, not words.
Why We Need an Open Letter
After the summits it became clear to us – we need to unite the MySQL community, get endorsement from the big players, push for popular features like vector indexes and new datatypes, and do everything in the open – including security bugs.
We need to create a non-profit foundation that isn’t dominated by a single vendor. One that enables permissionless open source innovation. One that works with Oracle but doesn’t depend on Oracle alone.
That’s why we’ve launched an Open Letter—an Invitation to Discuss the Future of the MySQL Ecosystem. You can read and sign it at letter.3306-db.org.
What the Open Letter Is (and Isn’t)
Let me be very clear about what this is:
This is an invitation to Oracle to sit down and have a strategic conversation about MySQL’s governance.
Model 1: Centralized Governance – Oracle leads the foundation, similar to the OpenELA model. Oracle takes the primary leadership role, retains strategic control, while distributing the operational maintenance load across industry partners.
Model 2: Collaborative Partnership – A federated approach where Oracle joins as a strategic partner and board member, but the industry establishes and manages the consortium. This includes a negotiated trademark agreement for non-profit use of the MySQL name.
Model 3: Autonomous Development – A community-led model where industry partners form a distinct legal entity dedicated to advocacy, evangelism, events, and adoption strategies. Fully decoupled from Oracle’s governance, but committed to keep Oracle accountable to their promises.
We’re not dictating which model Oracle should choose. We’re presenting options and asking them to engage in the conversation.
What We’re Asking From You
We’ll be presenting these governance models to Oracle this week. Based on their response, we’ll finalize the strategic direction by the end of March. Then we get to work on the legal and operational frameworks.
But none of this carries weight without the community behind it. If you care about MySQL’s future – whether you’re a DBA, a developer, a vendor, or someone who just runs MySQL in production and wants it to keep getting better – go to letter.3306-db.org and add your name.
When you sign the open letter at letter.3306-db.org, here’s what you should know:
- The goal is to demonstrate to Oracle the level of interest in this conversation.
- At a minimum, it serves as a survey to help us gauge if you consider this effort worthwhile.
Why Act Now
The strategic timeline we’ve proposed targets a decision on the governance model by the end of March 2026, with legal entity formation beginning in Q2 and a foundation launch in Q3.
We need to maintain ecosystem momentum while the community is energized. We need to address declining contribution rates before they become irreversible. We need to capitalize on the current willingness of industry players to collaborate. And we need to prevent further fragmentation and duplication of effort.
Let’s build this future together.
About the Author
Vadim TkachenkoVadim Tkachenko co-founded Percona in 2006 and leads Percona Labs, which focuses on technology research and performance evaluations of Percona’s and third-party products. Vadim’s expertise in LAMP performance and multi-threaded programming help optimize MySQL and InnoDB internals to take full advantage of modern hardware. He also co-authored the book High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication 3rd Edition.
