Oracle firmly believes that MySQL's enduring strength arises from this vibrant global community. We are excited to work with the MySQL Community on the strategy we announced in Belgium, January 29, 2026, including adding more features and functionality, accelerating innovation directly in the MySQL core.
For a long time I wanted to document something I have done many times in production systems but never explained clearly: using Django ORM as a standalone module to connect to an existing database. In my work I have often dealt with legacy systems where the only reliable source of truth was the database itself. In those situations, Django ORM became my Swiss army knife.
There is a growing emphasis on database compliance today due to the stricter enforcement of compliance rules and regulations to safeguard user privacy. For example, GDPR fines can reach £17.5 million or 4% of annual global turnover (the higher of the two applies). Besides the direct monetary implications, companies also need to prioritize compliance to protect their brand reputation and achieve growth.
In 2024, Oracle launched its Database 23ai, dropping the "c" suffix it established for cloud in 2013. But the release never arrived as a general on-premises option beyond Oracle's own engineered systems, and the company later pushed back the Premier Support cutoff for 19c to December 31, 2029, with Extended Support running through December 31, 2032. Premier support was originally slated to end in 2024.
But it still contains useful things and can be upgraded to from MySQL 8.4 LTS; the MySQL Configurator automatically does the upgrade without user intervention during MSI installations on Windows. The major changes include: A new Vector datatype is supported in CREATE and ALTER statements. JavaScript Stored Programs, which support JavaScript-based stored programs and functions, has come to MySQL Enterprise Edition. JavaScript Stored Programs can call SQL, and SQL can call them.
A new open-source project, VillageSQL, has been introduced as a tracking fork of MySQL aimed at expanding extensibility and addressing feature gaps increasingly relevant to AI and agent-based workloads. Announced by founder Dominic Preuss, VillageSQL Server for MySQL is positioned as a drop-in replacement that maintains compatibility with upstream MySQL while adding a structured extension framework. The alpha release is now available for experimentation.
Developers have spent the past decade trying to forget databases exist. Not literally, of course. We still store petabytes. But for the average developer, the database became an implementation detail; an essential but staid utility layer we worked hard not to think about. We abstracted it behind object-relational mappers (ORM). We wrapped it in APIs. We stuffed semi-structured objects into columns and told ourselves it was flexible.
Databricks today announced the general availability of Lakebase on AWS, a new database architecture that separates compute and storage. The managed serverless Postgres service is designed to help organizations build faster without worrying about infrastructure management. When databases link compute and storage, every query must use the same CPU and memory resources. This can cause a single heavy query to affect all other operations. By separating compute and storage, resources automatically scale with the actual load.
