Amid fears of stagnation, the community’s push to free MySQL from Oracle’s control is increasing

These signatories include database administrators, architects, and developers from MySQL fork providers such as Percona, MariaDB, and PlanetScale, as well as engineers and executives from companies such as Zoho, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Pinterest, among others.

Open letter reflects growing unease about MySQL’s direction

The signatories’ main concerns are the way Oracle has managed updates to the MySQL codebase, which they say has cost the database a significant loss of market share. Developers and enterprises are increasingly gravitating towards PostgreSQL as demand increases for AI-driven workloads where databases play a critical role in consolidating and serving data.

The letter also argued that the MySQL updates were not only “private” and sparse, but also did not even include features that are now essential for AI-driven workloads and have become standard in most databases, including the enterprise versions offered by Oracle.