Cutting corners: MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system developed by Swedish company MySQL AB in the mid 90s. Sun Microsystems acquired the firm in 2008, which Oracle saved from bankruptcy in 2010. Oracle is still acting as the steward of MySQL, but professionals are debating whether the company is still interested in maintaining the database technology.
MySQL is an essential technology for web servers and remotely managed applications. MariaDB, another widely used DB system which is a community-developed fork of MySQL (developed by one of the founders of MySQL AB) is designed to provide a high level of compatibility with MySQL. MariaDB can function as a drop-in replacement for MySQL in many cases. For this reason, database experts are expressing concerns about where Oracle is going with the project.
Oracle recently released MySQL 9.0, a new “innovative” iteration of the system, providing the community access to the latest RDBMS features. Tech evangelist for Percona Dave Stokes told The Register that MySQL 9.0 isn’t as innovative as the previous release (8.0) though.
Some of the best features developed by Oracle, including vector support and embedded JavaScript store procedures, are not available in the community edition of MySQL but only through Oracle’s commercial variant, HeatWave. “The ability to store the output of an EXPLAIN command to a variable is not the level of new feature hoped for,” Stokes said.
Free and open-source software professionals also expected advancements for query parallelization and optimization or broader support for the SQL language. They were disappointed when MySQL 9.0 came out earlier this month.
MySQL engineer Peter Zaitsev recently suggested that Oracle has little interest in giving away the latest and greatest RDBMS solutions to the MySQL community, focusing almost exclusively on money-making HeatWave instead. However, IDC’s Carl Olofson said the latest features developed for HeatWave aren’t geared for the broader MySQL market.
Meanwhile, Oracle designed vector store and other innovations related to generative AI technology for its cloud-based products. Olofson explained that HeatWave is marketed as a MySQL system with extra benefits for cloud-focused companies, so Oracle could not include these features in the MySQL community project.
MySQL was first released in 1995, while the community-developed fork, MariaDB, emerged in 2009 as a reaction to Oracle’s acquisition of the open-source technology. Both relational database systems have played a crucial role in the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack for web applications, which is used by some of the world’s most popular websites. MySQL is used (often extending the technology to scale) by companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, Airbnb, Booking.com, GitHub, and most WordPress websites, among others. At TechSpot, we used MySQL in the earlier revisions of our backend before eventually moving to MariaDB.