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For over two decades MySQL It has been the cornerstone of modern open source: the reference database for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, forums, blogs, e-commerce, CRM, and virtually every web application born from the 2000s onward. A legendary history, built on performance, simplicity, familiarity, and a gigantic community. In recent months, however, something seems to have changed. And it's not just an impression, but an objective fact: MySQL's public GitHub repository hasn't received commits in over 4 months.This unusual silence coincides with a number of worrying factors, including Oracle's internal layoffs in September, specifically within the team responsible for the project. This doesn't mean MySQL will disappear. That would be a sensational and false claim. MySQL is installed on millions of servers, is updated through official Oracle channels, and will continue to operate for years. However, what's happening to the public code is a clear and unequivocal signalMySQL is no longer – in effect – a community-driven open source project. It is now a proprietary product, developed behind closed doors, with commercial logic and priorities different from those of the open world that once fueled its growth. In this article, we'll analyze what's happening, why it's happening, what the consequences are, and why. MariaDB and PostgreSQL are increasingly outperforming MySQL.
1. A public repository down for four months: what does it really mean?
MySQL's GitHub repository, which has always been the "public" version of the code, now shows a bleak picture: no commits for over four monthsFor a project of this size, with thousands of enterprise, cloud, and mission-critical installations, such a long freeze is unusual, almost unnatural. Some developers have already pointed out that Oracle may be continuing development privately and only publishing updates in tarball format at release time. This is true: Oracle has the legal right to do so, as MySQL is dual-licensed (GPL and commercial). But one key point remains: An open source project without public funding isn't open source in essence. It's open source only on paper. Code is released only when final builds are made, with no observable development cycles, no open discussions, no pull requests, no community participation. And this is where MySQL ceases to be a living project.
2. Oracle layoffs and their impact on the MySQL team
In September, Oracle made significant cuts within several departments, including the MySQL development team. No official statements were released, but multiple internal sources and longtime contributors confirmed that the team had undergone significant downsizing, with the loss of key personnel who had contributed to the project's stability and evolution for years.
This downsizing doesn't come at a random time. Over the past two years, Oracle has had to deal with significant economic pressures linked to the advent of artificial intelligence, a sector in which infrastructure costs have exploded: increasingly expensive GPUs, data centers to expand, high-density interconnections, and growing energy consumption. The company has decided to invest heavily in AI infrastructure, strategic partnerships, and cloud services oriented towards generative models. All of this has required enormous resources and, inevitably, it entailed sacrifices on other fronts.
In this context, MySQL—a product that Oracle sees as generating value primarily in the paid enterprise space, but with little margin in its Community version—has become a natural candidate for cuts and reductions. From a strictly corporate perspective, it's no surprise that Oracle has preferred to focus investments on its most profitable and strategic business lines for the future, leaving MySQL in a state of near-minimal maintenance.
The result is visible: a project that stops receiving public commits just as the internal team is being scaled back. The connection becomes clear: Fewer developers, fewer resources, less investment, less quality control, less public roadmap, less business priorityOpen source software can survive many problems, but not this dangerous combination: silence + cuts + closed development. This is the clearest sign yet that MySQL is no longer central to Oracle's strategic vision.
3. MySQL was never truly free after the Oracle acquisition
To understand the origins of the current situation, we need to go back to 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and subsequently MySQL AB. There were immediate concerns: Would a giant that bases a large part of its revenue on a proprietary database really have an interest in allowing an open source and free competitor to prosper? The answer, over time, became clear.
After the acquisition, Oracle has strengthened the dual-license model, pushing the paid Enterprise version and gradually reducing the development transparency of the Community Edition. Many advanced features have been made exclusive to the commercial version, while the public code began to receive fewer contributions, fewer discussions, and fewer roadmaps. In parallel, many of MySQL's historic engineers have left the project, contributing to the birth and growth of MariaDB, the fork created precisely to preserve the original approach.
For years, this situation was tolerated because MySQL remained the de facto web standard, and alternatives—MariaDB and PostgreSQL—were still emerging. But today the landscape has changed: MariaDB has become a modern, open project supported by a real community, while PostgreSQL has won over developers and new cloud-native projects thanks to its technical maturity. MySQL, on the other hand, has found itself increasingly closed, less innovative, and marginalized in the most vibrant part of the open source ecosystem.
4. MariaDB: the true spiritual successor
When Michael “Monty” Widenius, the original creator of MySQL, launched MariaDB, he did so with a very clear mission statement: save MySQL from Oracle acquisition and ensure that its evolution remained free, transparent, and truly open. MariaDB was born as a complete fork, fully compatible and supported by an independent foundation. For years, many considered it merely a "Plan B," one of several possible forks. But today, the exact opposite is true: MariaDB represents the authentic continuation of the original spirit of MySQL.
One of the most evident signs of this philosophy is the choice of maintain and improve the Query Cache, a historic feature that Oracle completely removed from MySQL 8.0. Oracle's official justification was that the Query Cache introduced complexity and locks, but in reality those limitations were due to the internal implementation and the fact that MySQL was no longer investing in improving it. MariaDB, however, took the opposite approach: it not only kept the Query Cache, but also restructured and optimized, making it more scalable and much more effective on real-world workloads, especially in web environments and on high-traffic platforms with repetitive queries. This is a concrete example of the different approaches of the two projects: where MySQL cuts, MariaDB improves and reinvests.
And then it arrived MariaDB 12, a release that marked a huge evolutionary leap. While MySQL has been progressing slowly in recent years—indeed, at almost no pace in its public repository—MariaDB introduced a series of profound optimizations in recent versions to the storage engine, query planner, and threading management. Among the most notable:
- Optimizations to the InnoDB and Aria engine, with significant reductions in contention and improved management of I/O flows.
- Substantial improvements to the query planner cost estimator, which allows you to choose smarter and more efficient execution plans even in complex scenarios.
- Enhanced multi-threaded performance, thanks to constant work on internal parallelization.
- Reduce latency in highly concurrent queries, with concrete results in areas such as e-commerce and real-time applications.
- DDL/DML Optimizations, with operations on large and complex tables much faster.
- New improvements in standard SQL compatibility, making MariaDB a more versatile and modern environment.
These innovations aren't just patches: they represent a living, coherent roadmap, driven by an actively participating community that proposes improvements, experiments, and contributes. This is exactly what MySQL had lost.
Today, in fact, many Linux distributions have chosen MariaDB as the default database, precisely because development is open, constant and predictable. Compatibility with MySQL remains very high, but it is now one wayMariaDB continues to introduce features, fixes, and optimizations that advance the project, while MySQL continues on increasingly distant, closed tracks.
In this scenario, with MySQL increasingly opaque and oriented towards purely commercial logic, MariaDB has become the true continuation of the original project, one that maintains the open source spirit and continues to evolve in response to real-world needs. A project supported by a true, participatory community, keeping alive what MySQL was—and what it can no longer be.
5. PostgreSQL: Unstoppable Growth
If MariaDB is the natural successor, PostgreSQL represents a real cultural shiftIt is a complete, modern, and rigorous enterprise database, designed with an architectural depth that makes it suitable for the most critical loads. Its strength lies not only in its stability, but also in its ability to be infinitely extensible: through extensions and plugins it can be transformed into an advanced geospatial database (PostGIS), a distributed system for massive clustering (Citus) or an engine optimized for temporal and time series analysis.
On a technical level it offers Real MVCC, native logical replication, advanced partitioning, advanced indexes, a highly sophisticated planner and adherence to SQL standard Among the best in the open source landscape. Its update pace is constant, transparent, and community-driven: each release introduces concrete improvements, without unexpected breaks and with a completely open development process.
It is therefore not surprising that Anyone designing large-scale systems, cloud-native services, enterprise platforms, or distributed architectures today should choose PostgreSQL as a reference technology. Those who need historical continuity, compatibility, and a "modern and free MySQL" choose MariaDB.
In this context, MySQL remains on the table almost exclusively through inertia or inherited constraints from older applications. It's no longer the natural choice in new projects, but a component retained because it's already present or imposed by legacy stacks.
6. The myth of simplicity is no longer enough
For years, MySQL has excelled thanks to its simplicity, accessible configuration, and good out-of-the-box performance. But the world of 2025 demands more: native clustering, horizontal scaling, advanced JSON, container optimizations, robust replication, extensibility. MySQL has addressed some of these needs, but late and without a truly open ecosystem. Today, simplicity is no longer enough.
7. What does it really mean that MySQL is “going down”?
This doesn't mean MySQL is dead or unusable. It means something deeper: MySQL has lost its open source nature. When a project stops accepting public contributions, stops exposing development, and stops involving users, that project is no longer a community project. It's a corporate product. And Oracle treats it as such: internal roadmaps, code published only after releases are completed, and commercial priorities.
8. Consequences for sysadmins and developers
In the short term, nothing changes: MySQL will continue to function, receive security patches, and be present in the repositories. In the medium to long term, however:
- less innovation
- less transparency
- greater risk of lock-in
- loss of community
- almost non-existent plugin ecosystem
- reduced compatibility with other forksA project without community is a project that slows to a halt.
9. The big cloud providers are already making clear choices
AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure are investing significantly more in PostgreSQL and MariaDB than in MySQL. This isn't an isolated case, but a very clear industry trend: the major hyperscalers have understood that innovation, scalability, and market demand are moving in the PostgreSQL-first direction. AWS, for example, has developed two proprietary variants— Aurora MySQL e Aurora PostgreSQL —but in recent years, it's the PostgreSQL version that has received the most significant investment, the most optimizations, and the most attention in roadmaps. And when we talk about "MySQL" on AWS, in most cases, we're no longer talking about authentic MySQL, but about optimized, not fully compatible forks.
Google Cloud follows the same logic: Cloud SQL has pushed PostgreSQL hard, integrating it natively with BigQuery, the Kubernetes ecosystem, and AI services. Integration with MySQL, on the other hand, remains more static, almost maintenance-based, justified primarily by the vast legacy applications that still use it.
Microsoft Azure is even more explicit: the service Azure Database for PostgreSQL It receives continuous improvements in performance, availability, autoscaling, and enterprise features. In contrast, MySQL's path on Azure is more sluggish, lacking any real innovative momentum. Here, too, the direction is clear.
And then there is the final paradox: even Oracle invests much more in its Oracle Database than in MySQL, treating the latter as a minor product, almost an "entry level" for scenarios of little strategic relevance. Oracle's cloud initiatives, such as Autonomous Database, are all centered on the parent company's flagship database—certainly not MySQL.
When even the project owner doesn't consider it a priority, and major global cloud providers redirect investment and innovation towards PostgreSQL, it means the direction is clear: MySQL is slowly but surely losing its traction as the cloud ecosystem shifts to more modern, transparent, and active technology stacks.
10. The overtaking has already happened
Looking at global trends, the picture is now clear. PostgreSQL is today the most advanced and most chosen open source database in new projects, thanks primarily to its transparent development model, enterprise features (logical replication, true MVCC, extensions like PostGIS and Citus), and constant pace of innovation. International developer surveys consistently rank it as the top preferred database technology in new cloud-native stacks and modern architectures.
MariaDB, for its part, remains the direct successor to MySQLIt was born as a fork driven by the original creators with the explicit goal of preserving freedom, openness, and compatibility. Today, it's the natural choice for those seeking continuity with the MySQL ecosystem but without accepting the closed and commercial logic imposed by Oracle. Many Linux distributions have also adopted it as the default database for this very reason.
MySQL, on the other hand, survives mainly through historical legacy. It remains extremely popular—especially in the world of CMS and traditional hosting—but its trajectory is that of a project that grows slowly and loses its appeal in new developments. It's not a sudden decline, but a slow erosion: PostgreSQL dominates new adoptions, MariaDB takes over its technical legacy, while MySQL stagnates, more through inertia than real vitality. This leadership is maintained only in existing installations, no longer in future technological choices.
11. It's not the end of MySQL… but it's the end of an era
MySQL may not disappear, but its golden age is over. It's no longer the symbol of participatory open source, the transparent, community-based project that accompanied the explosion of Web 2.0. It's an Oracle product. Reliable, sure. But no longer free. When one giant stops running, others overtake it. And today, the future of open source databases belongs to MariaDB and PostgreSQL.
