Percona’s version of MySQL Conference this year was awesome, and there were some great keynotes there, I’ll high-light two of them.

One was called “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL” and had a vendor panel of “Industry leaders from HP, Amazon Web Services, McAfee, Clustrix, and Akiban discuss the future of MySQL”.

It went like this:

BaronTheModerator: “so, what is the future for MySQL?”
HP Cloud: “Clouds!”
Amazon Web Services: “Clouds and DynamoDB/RDS!”
McAffee: “More Security!”
Clustrix: “More Scaling!”
Akiban: “More document stores!”

BaronTheModerator, “what do your customers ask for?”
HP Cloud: “Clouds!”
Amazon Web Services: “Clouds and DynamoDB/RDS!”
…

After an hour of that I already knew a lot about road ahead for MySQL, much more than after pragmatic “What Comes Next”, which covered boring things like optimizing for future hardware, compression, bla bla.

Probably the most significant part of keynotes was Brian Aker’s disclosure of his impact on MySQL ecosystem in his “The New MySQL Cloud Ecosystem”. Actually, people should know that Brian actually coined the term “MySQL Ecosystem”. Brian remembered his days as MySQL’s Director of Architecture (05:16 in the video):

So, what I think we’ve now been entering for last couple years really is actually the cloud era. And we have glued some pieces of things… It’s funny, we’re talking about… you know… I’m looking at MySQL 5.5 and look at 5.6 and I’m like yep, I remember, thats the roadmaps I wrote, ha, glad to know, I’m curious what they gonna do after 5.6. Didn’t leave many.. eh.. Cliff Notes to what goes behi… after that.

This reveals that MySQL Community and Oracle customer base are actually locked in into a stagnant software product with no future. I think you should be worried. Heh.