Peter Zaitsev is a software engineer and entrepreneur from Russia. He once worked as a performance engineer in MySQL. About 15 years ago, when Oracle acquired Sun and then MySQL, there were many discussions about when Oracle would "kill MySQL". He also defended Oracle for these unfriendly comments on the Internet.
But today, Zaitsev's view has changed. He started question Oracle prefers to add functions to its proprietary system. Will it inadvertently kill open source MySQL.
For example, the MySQL Heatwave (Oracle's MySQL cloud database) promoted by the company in recent years includes many functions that MySQL Community or MySQL Enterprise do not have, such as accelerated analysis and query or ML functions.
Zaitsev pointed out that the serious problem is that the open source MySQL does not even have the parallel query execution function.
"When CPUs with hundreds of cores are constantly on the market, the speed of these cores has not significantly improved, which increasingly limits the performance... Can this give people more reasons to accept MySQL Heartwave? Or, people are more willing to switch to PostgreSQL or use Clickhouse?"
Another feature that is available in Heartwave but not in open source MySQL is Vector Search. At present, almost all other mainstream open source databases have added support for the vector search function, and MariaDB is also working hard to implement this function. However, in the MySQL ecosystem, this is only a unique feature of MySQL Heatwave.
More strangely, Javascript support has also been released as a unique feature of MySQL Enterprise. Zaitsev believes that these measures will undoubtedly limit the adoption of MySQL.
"If this is not enough, it seems that the performance engineering department of MySQL has been ignored for many years. Compared with MySQL 5.6, its performance on simple single threaded workloads is significantly reduced. You can say features cost performance, but MariaDB can significantly reduce performance degradation. PostgreSQL even improves performance while adding new functions In any case, unless Oracle turns its attention to the needs of modern developers for relational databases, it will kill relational databases. "
Zaitsev point out If Oracle believes that the burden of maintaining MySQL is greater than the value it can obtain from it, it wants everyone to maintain it together. Then they can "transfer it to the Linux Foundation or other independent non-profit entities, and focus on maintaining its internal version (similar to AWS Aurora)".
Mark Callaghan also agreed: "I agree, but it hurts to admit this. My community is disappearing - external contributors expand MySQL, invade MySQL, submit error reports, fix errors, and sometimes make it better."
