My Impressions from Oracle AI World 2025 – MySQL, AI, and Its Open Source Future

3 weeks ago 1

Note: The opinions below represent my personal perspective only. They don’t include any confidential information or represent the views of Oracle or my current employer, Percona.

The question I brought home after this conference is:

Was this an AI conference because everyone is already using AI, or because they want you to use AI?

For context, I’ve worked with MySQL databases for more than 12 years, mainly focused on the open-source ecosystem. However, as an Oracle ACE Director, I also keep an eye on what’s happening with the enterprise and cloud offerings. Understanding what happens outside — even in the PostgreSQL world — helps me see how MySQL differentiates itself and maintains its position as the leading open-source database, although it has lost ground to Postgres in recent years.

Below are my impressions from Oracle AI World 2025 and what I expect for MySQL’s future (both open-source and commercial).

The event

I’ve just finished my journey at Oracle AI World, and while the experience is still fresh, I decided to write down my thoughts. It was my first time at a conference of this scale — more than 20,000 attendees, great energy, and positivity. I really loved it, and I recommend that everyone go. On the technical side, multiple simultaneous sessions covering every part of Oracle’s ecosystem — all under one main focus: AI.

If you look at the press coverage, most of it echoes Oracle’s message:

Billions of dollars are being invested in datacenter infrastructure and AI. The close relationship between Oracle and Nvidia stands out — a kind of symbiosis where one is both supplier and customer of the other. From the outside, it’s hard to tell who benefits more. The same applies to Nvidia and OpenAI — in fact, almost every major AI conversation today seems to have Nvidia’s influence behind it.

MySQL and AI — where do we stand?

Now, back to what interests us: MySQL.

Given Oracle’s clear strategic focus on AI, it’s no surprise that MySQL followed that direction too. And I was not wrong — we saw several MySQL/Heatwave sessions during the event, as shown in the picture below.

MySQL HeatWave schedule

One of the key announcements was MySQL AI for on-premises, available only in the Enterprise Edition. It’s an interesting solution because it allows AI to run on CPUs instead of GPUs — not the fastest option, but it’s good to see flexibility in deployment. Unfortunately, the community edition doesn’t include support for this feature, and current vector datatype support remains limited. There’s a noticeable gap between community and enterprise versions, and an even wider one when comparing with HeatWave on OCI.

I also participated in a session titled “MySQL Panel: Experts and Rock Stars,” where we discussed open challenges MySQL users face today. It was a refreshing conversation with attendees about upgrades, optimization, and how the community can collaborate to improve the technology.

Natural Language and AI integration

Many sessions showcased MySQL’s ability to interact with AI agents and process natural language queries, including the new NL2SQL feature.

It’s promising technology, though I’m still unsure about real-world adoption at the current moment. I spoke to a few companies using it for customer support and educational use cases — mainly to enhance their knowledge base and offer a personalized experience to their users. Yet, all confirmed a common pattern: AI assists, but humans verify. The goal remains productivity, not replacement.

The open-source gap

The elephant in the room is the growing distance between the enterprise/Heatwave and community editions. Oracle’s commercial focus is understandable — large investments need to generate returns — but this separation limits community innovation.

It’s understandable that Oracle, like any company, focuses on profitability — these are massive investments. Still, some companies have consistently contributed to the ecosystem, such as Percona, Uber, and Facebook, while others like AWS simply replace MySQL with Aurora, apply their own changes, and contribute little back.

It’s not easy to balance, and I don’t claim to have a clear answer. But as a user, ACE Director, and advocate for the technology, I believe narrowing the gap between the Community Edition and OCI/HeatWave would benefit everyone.

Developers are often the ones who truly drive technology forward, relying on open-source environments to test ideas, learn, and experiment freely. Even with OCI’s free tier, the experience isn’t the same. Ideally, most companies should have the ability to access MySQL AI features locally to explore and test the technology — even if their infrastructure isn’t powerful enough to run AI workloads efficiently. This experimentation phase is essential for technological maturity within any organization; as the company evolves, its needs and workloads naturally move toward more optimized environments.

That’s where users and organizations ultimately gravitate toward cloud providers offering dedicated AI infrastructure. It’s the natural order of things — yet this is precisely where the MySQL Community Edition is losing momentum and breaking the innovation chain.

Business reality vs. open source potential

From what I see, Oracle’s aggressive quarterly goals and financial expectations suggest the community edition might not receive the same level of attention as before. I don’t expect any drastic structural changes, such as transferring MySQL to a neutral foundation (like the Linux Foundation).

Still, that could be a strategic move — maintaining a strong user base, reducing costs by encouraging community contributions, and continuing to profit from the enterprise and OCI versions. Maybe this is an idealistic view, but I see more long-term value and sustainable business in a more open approach.

When we look at PostgreSQL, it’s clear that its openness drives innovation. The pgvector extension (https://github.com/pgvector/pgvector) is a good example — much more advanced today than MySQL’s community current vector implementation. In practice, the real competitor of Postgres would be MySQL Enterprise in the AI field. And it is a fact that once an ecosystem becomes mature and self-sustaining inside a company, switching becomes hard, as it would require rewriting the application and building knowledge on the new database technology. So in the end, it is unlikely a company that opted for the Postgres open source version would migrate to MySQL Heatwave.

Final reflections

Despite these challenges, the MySQL community remains vibrant, with over 1 billion installations worldwide. I’m still very enthusiastic about the product and confident about its future. MySQL can reach another golden era — it only requires Oracle to listen more closely to the community and bridge both worlds.

For now, my next stop is FOSDEM 2026 (https://fosdem.org/2026/), where we’ll have another strong lineup for MySQL. See you there!

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