Keeping up with the MySQL ecosystem is becoming increasingly challenging. Every release introduces new features, performance improvements, security enhancements, and cloud capabilities. While the official documentation is comprehensive, it is not always easy to quickly identify what really matters.

To help with that, I've published a new edition of my MySQL & MySQL HeatWave Report, covering the most important announcements around MySQL 9.7 LTS and MySQL HeatWave 9.7.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/freshdaz/mysql-and-mysql-heatwave-report-june-2026

The post MySQL & MySQL HeatWave Report – June 2026 first appeared on Data Daz (dasini.net) - Data Systems, AI, and Real-World Insights.

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 …

MySQL observability is essential in modern enterprises, whether you run a few critical databases or operate at massive scale. With the right real‑time monitoring, teams reduce MTTD/MTTR, avoid cascading failures, and continuously track workload health—CPU, memory, I/O, buffer pool efficiency, session contention, transaction/replication lag, error rates, and query latency. This Grafana monitoring template helps teams […]

MySQL HeatWave is a fully-managed MySQL database service that combines transactions, analytics, machine learning, and GenAI services, without ETL duplication. Also included is HeatWave Lakehouse, allowing users to query data stored in object storage, MySQL databases, or a combination of both. Introduction In the 9.6.1 release of MySQL HeatWave, Lakehouse now supports the _metadata_filename column […]

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 […]

In our earlier post, we unpacked the mechanics of MySQL HeatWave maintenance, the behind-the-scenes process that keeps your MySQL environments secure, stable, and optimized without changing your database version. We also touched on how Auto Minor Version Upgrades occur when a version reaches the end of its lifecycle. With this update, MySQL HeatWave introduces Configurable Maintenance Windows and Auto-Upgrade Controls, giving you […]

If you want to create a new application, test it, and deploy it on the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides an always-free tier for compute instances and MySQL HeatWave instances (and more). If you are a developer, it can also be complicated to start deploying to the cloud, as you need to figure out the […]