The latest from the MySQL community

When a commercial entity says they are working on an open source database, community members fairly ask what that means to them. They also ask if the same rules apply to everyone or just the company’s employees. Can an outsider see what's planned? Does a pull request from a stranger go through the same process as one from an employee? This blog post explores how VillageSQL approaches open source by stepping through how we are operating the VillageSQL Server project. VillageSQL Server is the open source tracking fork of MySQL that adds an extension framework to enable permissionless innovation on MySQL. 

GPLv2, inherited from MySQL

VillageSQL Server is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), because that is how upstream MySQL is licensed and VillageSQL inherits that due to the copy left nature of GPLv2. The …

Percona Operator for MySQL 1.3.0 is out. This release moves three things forward for teams running MySQL on Kubernetes: the operator now tunes MySQL for you based on the pod resources, async clusters can fail over without losing data in flight, and point-in-time recovery works on clusters where binary logs are encrypted at rest.

The headline features in this post are automatic MySQL configuration tuning, zero data loss failover for asynchronous clusters, and encrypted binary logs for point-in-time recovery. Each of them removes a step that teams were doing by hand, or a case they had to accept as a known gap.

As with every operator release, most of what shipped came from what the community asked for on forums.percona.com and in …

Probably everyone responsible for managing database servers at some point realizes that it would be helpful to have a tool capable of extracting data directly from raw database files. Something completely offline, without the need to have a running database server, and that would work with data directories, files, or binary backups (storage volume snapshots, XtraBackup, etc).

There are a couple of use cases for that I could think of:

• Crashed/corrupted data recovery – if the database service refuses to start or enters a crash-restart loop and there are no good backups (PITR!) available.
• Backup (additional) verification and data files health check.
• Extraction of individual databases or tables from a full backup.
• Quick provisioning of staging/QA instances …

I opened my MySQL BR Conf 2026 talk creating a new data type that stock MySQL doesn’t have: ROT13. … OK, admittedly, it’s a silly type. With a ROT13 column, you insert plain strings and read back plain strings, but the table stores scrambled text. … OK, it’s very *very* silly. But the point of this example isn’t to convince you extensions are useful; it’s to show a tiny extension that allows exploring design choices we made in designing the VEF (VillageSQL Extension Framework).

What the talk covers

• Simpler functions and aggregates. VDF’s (VEF-Defined Functions) resemble MySQL UDF’s (User-Defined Functions), but are easier to write. I explore how we made it both more ergonomic in C++ and also how we make it harder to mess up.
• Types …

PostgreSQL has a rapidly evolving vector ecosystem. MySQL is earlier on that road, but the community is hard at work catching up. MariaDB ships its own HNSW index, Google engineers have shared a ScaNN-based vector index on MySQL's own vector index proposal, Percona is building an HNSW index inside InnoDB, and VillageSQL is building vector search as an extension with vsql-vector.

We want vector search on MySQL to be something that teams can …

At Percona Live Europe 2026, Dmitry Lenev and I presented JavaScript in My Database? Over My Dead Query, the story of component_js_lang, the V8-based JavaScript engine for Percona Server for MySQL 8.4. That experience told us few things:

• The presentation was seen as “for developers”
• What most DBA or DevOps heard was “JavaScript in the database” = “application logic in the database”

This let most of the people pictured developers shipping their business logic into stored procedures. Order workflows, pricing rules, REST calls, all running inside mysqld. 

That picture is wrong, and in this post I want to replace it with the right one, using the same four demos we showed on stage.

The fear is reasonable, the target is wrong

DBAs have earned their skepticism. Many of us have inherited a schema where thousands of lines of stored …

We are pleased to announce the launch of VillageSQL Server 0.0.7. You now have a License to Query (please note this post contains lots of James Bond 007 database puns). In this release, the mysql-8.4 build tracks MySQL Server 8.4.11, the mysql-9.7 build tracks MySQL Server 9.7.2, and the percona-8.4 build carries Percona Server 8.4.11-11.

Highlights of this release include the following:

• The server can now describe a custom index, store its data, report it, and run a nearest-neighbor search through it. This is the foundation of custom indexing and vector search we demoed at Percona Live Amsterdam 2026.
• CLONE now checks that the recipient has your extensions before it copies anything.
• An extension can give every connection its own copy of a setting.
…

On October 1-2, Chernihiv Polytechnic National University held the II International scientific and practical conference “Free/Open Source Software in Education, Science & Business”. The conference was online and free for everyone. The idea is to bring together people from universities, from industry and from open source communities and talk about how free software is used in education, science and business.

This year Percona was well represented. There were six speakers from Percona, and two more keynote speakers also worked at Percona in the past.

Day 1: keynotes

The first day started with welcome words from Volodymyr Bazylevych, Chair of the Organizing Committee, and Anatolii Prystupa, Vice-Rector for Research. After that there were five keynote talks.

Yevhen Patlan (Percona) spoke about embedding DuckDB …

Over the period, we have witnessed how MySQL versioning evolved from 8.0 to 9.7 LTS, and now it has entered a new era: a calendar-based model.

Let’s first take a brief look at how MySQL versioning has evolved over time.

• Phase 1 – MySQL 8.0 (2018–2026) used a traditional single-track release model, with all new features and bug fixes rolled into the same 8.0 release line.
• Phase 2 – Oracle launches an Innovative/LTS dual-track model (Mid 2023). Innovation releases focus on new features and changes to short-lived performance on a quarterly basis. The LTS (Long Term Stable) release is steadier and has a long lifespan, with a cycle of 5 years of Premier Support + 3 years of Extended Support, and it typically launches every 2 years.
• Phase 3 – There are chains of Innovation releases following (8.1, …

Percona Toolkit’s pt-online-schema-change (pt-osc) has long been the preferred solution for performing online schema changes with minimal downtime. Its chunk-based copy algorithm is designed to adapt dynamically to the workload, making it suitable for very large tables in production environments.

However, under specific conditions, one of its optimization mechanisms can become counterproductive.

During a customer engagement involving Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC), we investigated a case where running pt-online-schema-change with a selective –where clause caused severe Galera Flow Control and general overhead, effectively stalling the cluster for an extended period. The issue was not caused by the schema change itself, but by the interaction between:

• adaptive chunk auto-resizing
• highly selective copying of the newest rows
• clustered replication in Galera
• InnoDB …