The latest release of MySQL has underwhelmed some commentators who fear Oracle - the custodian of the open source database - may have other priorities.

Earlier this month, Oracle - which has long marketed its range of proprietary database systems - published the 9.0 version as an "Innovation Release" of MySQL. MySQL 9.0 is now among the three iterations Oracle supports. The others include 8.0 (8.0.38) and the first update of the 8.4 LTS (8.4.1).

MySQL was originally developed by David Axmark and Michael Widenius, with the first release dating back to 1995. The founding Swedish company, MySQL AB, was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2008, while Sun was itself subsumed by Oracle in 2009. Immediately after that takeover, Michael - or "Monty" - Widenius forked MySQL to launch MariaDB, hiring a group of the MySQL development team at the same time. MariaDB has since been publishing its MySQL iteration, particularly as a managed service DBaaS.

In June, Peter Zaitsev, an early MySQL engineer and founder of open source consultancy Percona, said he feared the lack of features in MySQL was a result of Oracle’s focus on Heatwave, a proprietary analytics database built on MySQL. He had previously defended Oracle's stewardship of the open source database.

The release of MySQL 9.0 has not assuaged those concerns, said colleague Dave Stokes, Percona technology evangelist. It had not lived up to the previous 8.0 release, which arrived with many new features.

"MySQL 9.0 is supposed to be an 'innovation release' where [Oracle offers] access to the latest features and improvements and [users] enjoy staying on top of the latest technologies," he said.

However, he pointed out most more innovative features, such as vector support and embedded JavaScript store procedures, were not in the free MySQL Community Edition and were only available on the paid-for HeatWave edition. "The ability to store the output of an EXPLAIN command to a variable is not the level of new feature hoped for," he said.

The community had also hoped for incremental advancement in query parallelization, more potent query optimizations, or more items from the SQL standard to be included in the 9.0 release, but were left disappointed, he added.

The Register has invited Oracle to respond.

Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC, told us that while it might be true Oracle focused on Heatwave rather than the MySQL, not all of the most innovative features would be appropriate for community edition.

"My reading of the situation is that the HeatWave innovations, particularly around the vector store and other GenAI features, are grounded in Oracle managed cloud-based system and storage deployment, and really could not be done otherwise. Oracle regards HeatWave as a build out of MySQL that provides extra benefits based on the direct Oracle implementation (such as AutoPilot). Those features could not be included in the MySQL project," he said in an emailed statement.

"It might be said that Oracle concentrates most new innovations on HeatWave rather than MySQL Community, and that seems fair, but to say those innovations could have been done in MySQL Community, deployed on any hardware, is probably not true. Oracle does have a variant available on AWS, but even there the software is deployed and run by Oracle staff," he added. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/16/mysql_9_underwhelms_community/