Latest MySQL release is underwhelming, say some DB experts
Oracle's priorities may lie elsewhere but it is unfair to say all innovation can go in community edition, reckons analyst
Updated 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.
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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. ®
Updated to add on July 17:
Someone from the MySQL community has been in touch to point out that the release notes for MySQL 9.0 say vectors have been added as a data type. However, the release notes add the caveat: "Some types of MySQL functions and operators do not accept vectors as arguments. These include but are not limited to numeric functions and operators, temporal functions, full-text search functions, XML functions, bit functions, and JSON functions."
This raises some questions. In the press release for Heatwave, Oracle says: "For a given user query, the vector store identifies the most similar documents by performing a similarity search over the stored embeddings and the embedded query."
The Register understands that while the vector datatype is new to MySQL, the amount of available functions is limited. In MySQL HeatWave there is one extra function called vector_distance(), which supports similarity search. The Register contacted Percona and Oracle to try to understand the distinct approach to vectors in MySQL 9.0 and Heatwave.
Updated to add on July 26:
Percona's Dave Stokes has since provided some clarity, telling The Reg: "The Oracle contact is correct - technically, the 'Vector' datatype is now included in all MySQL 9.0 editions so this should be corrected.
"However, the usage is very limited and practically non-existent if a user is not willing to write a lot of code around it at the application level. I will say that having a vector datatype alone with no supporting way to search is like having a bowl of soup but no spoon. Other databases that support vector processing have nearest neighbour searches at a minimum. As of 9.0, we can store vectors and can examine them but the data would have to be processed away from the database itself; that is not efficient.
"The embedded JavaScript via Graal VM has been promised for a long time. This JavaScript support is not available in the Community version, full stop. This means it is not available in a version that is both production-ready and which is available to all. If you want it, you need to go for some level of subscription. Based on this, I would argue it is not generally available for everyone to use without restriction."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
