Modern AI systems increasingly rely on multimodal data: text, images, documents, audio, and video. Among these modalities, image understanding has become one of the most important capabilities for AI-powered applications.
Traditionally, implementing these capabilities required specialized computer vision infrastructure, external vector databases, custom ML pipelines, and multiple frameworks.
With MySQL HeatWave GenAI, many of these capabilities can now be implemented directly inside SQL workflows using built-in AI routines.
In this article, we will build the foundations of a Vision Model Evaluation Assistant using MySQL HeatWave GenAI. The objective is not to create another image classifier, but rather a semantic image understanding platform.

The post Building an AI Vision Search Engine with MySQL …

May 2026 · 5 min read. Alkin Tezuysal

Cross blog from Oracle https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/mysql-9-7-is-out-and-the-community-wins

MySQL 9.7 came out on April 21 and I’ve been going through the release notes so you don’t have to. The short version: Oracle has made several previously Enterprise-only features available in the Community Edition; the Hypergraph Optimizer is now free for everyone; and if you’re still on MySQL 8.0, it has reached End-of-Life. Like right now. We’ll get to that.

Let’s go through what matters most.

First: MySQL 8.0 has reached End-of-Life

MySQL 8.0.46 shipped alongside 9.7, and it is the last 8.0 release. As of April 2026, 8.0 is officially End-of-Life. No more security patches. No …

Recently, we received an alert for one of our Managed Services customers indicating that the auto_increment value for the table was 80% of its maximum capacity. The column was INT UNSIGNED, which has a limit of 4,294,967,295.

At 80%, we have enough time to change it to BIGINT.…. Right? Let’s see.

So we used pt-online-schema-change to perform the alter.

It started running at a good pace but slowed over time.

Why?

Well, let’s look at the definition of the table:

mysql> show create table myschema.mytableG
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: mytable
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `mytable` (
  `id` int unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `long_column` …

Last week, ProxySQL announced that they are taking over the maintenance and development of Orchestrator, the MySQL high-availability and topology management tool originally authored by Shlomi Noach. You can read their announcement here: Announcing the future of Orchestrator.

We want to briefly share Percona’s position on the news.

We welcome this

Orchestrator became the de facto standard for MySQL topology management and automated failover, and it has been a foundational tool in the ecosystem for over a decade. When the upstream project was archived, many operators were left running internal forks. A revived project under active development, with a stated roadmap and continued Apache 2.0 licensing, is good news for the MySQL community, and we’re glad to see ProxySQL step up to take it on. Thanks are due to Shlomi Noach …

Having a separate DR cluster for production databases is a modern day requirement or necessity for tech and other related businesses that rely heavily on their database systems. Setting up such a [DC -> DR] topology for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), which is a virtually- synchronous cluster, can be a bit challenging in a complex Kubernetes environment.

Here, Percona Operator for MySQL comes in handy, with a minimal number of steps to configure such a topology, which ensures a remote side backup or a disaster recovery solution.

So without taking much time, let’s see how the overall setup and configurations look from a practical standpoint.

PXC Cross-Site/Disaster Recovery

DC Configuration

1) Here we have a three-node PXC cluster running on the DC side.

shell> kubectl get pods -n pxc
NAME                                               READY   STATUS …

Deploying databases on Kubernetes is getting easier every year. The part that still hurts is making deployments repeatable and predictable across clusters and environments, especially from Continuous Integration(CI) perspective. This is where PR-based automation helps; you can review a plan, validate changes, and only apply after approval, before anything touches your cluster.  If you’ve ever […]

We have reached the end of our series on deploying to OCI using the Hackathon Starter Kit. For this last article, we will see how to deploy an application using Helidon (Java), the MySQL REST Service, and OCI GenAI with Lanchain4J. We use Helidon because it’s a cool, open-source framework developed by Oracle. It’s lightweight […]

The starter kit deploys a MySQL HeatWave DB System on OCI and enables the MySQL REST Service automatically: The REST Service enables us to provide access to data without requiring SQL. It also provides access to some Gen AI functionalities available in MySQL HeatWave. Adding data to MRS using Visual Studio Code To be able […]

In part 4 of our series on the OCI Hackathon Starter Kit, we saw how to connect to the deployed MySQL HeatWave instance from our clients (MySQL Shell, MySQL Shell for VS Code, and Cloud Shell). In this post, we will see how to connect from an application using a connector. We will cover connections […]

Let’s now see how we can connect to our MySQL HeatWave DB System, which was deployed with the OCI Hackathon Starter Kit in part 1. We have multiple possibilities to connect to the DB System, and we will use three of them: MySQL Shell in the command line MySQL Shell is already installed on the […]