MySQL Repository Analysis Reveals Declining Development and Shrinking Contributor Base

Write for InfoQ

A recent report has analyzed the repository statistics of the MySQL server to evaluate the project's status, Oracle's commitment to MySQL, and the future of the community edition. Julia Vural, software engineer manager at Percona, writes:

The MySQL database server is a foundational component of the open-source world. While its impact is undeniable, looking at the raw statistics of its core source code repository reveals a dynamic and sometimes surprising development history (...) The yearly view of commits, emphasizes the volatility but clearly validates the long-term declining trend. (...) Based purely on the historical volume of commits, the project's activity is projected to continue its decline.

According to the analysis, the number of people actively working on MySQL has dropped from a peak of 198 in 2006 to around 75 in 2025. Meanwhile, the annual number of code updates has decreased roughly fourfold over the past 14 years, indicating less overall work on the project.

Source: Percona blog

Vural summarizes:

The overall trend since 2011 shows a sustained decline in the number of commits and a shrinking pool of unique contributors. The trendline is a clear warning that, without intervention, the general development pace is expected to slow further. However, the increasing, focused effort on "Heatwave" suggests that development resources are being strategically allocated to high-priority, commercial initiatives within the broader MySQL ecosystem.

The report shows that the amount of new core programming code being added each year has been declining over time, possibly because the software has matured or development has shifted to proprietary versions. Some developers are asking for a similar analysis of the PostgreSQL repository to better compare the two trends.

Earlier this year, Oracle laid off a significant number of developers working on the MySQL community edition, and some of the latest major features have been available only on MySQL Heatwave, the managed service on OCI, and in MySQL Enterprise Edition, raising further concerns in the community. Patrik Backman, MariaDB co-founder, writes:

How far can Oracle scale back MySQL engineering before developer mindshare begins to erode? How long will large enterprises accept feature lock-in as the price of continuity?

As previously reported by InfoQ, MySQL AI was introduced only for the enterprise edition, with PlanetScale forking the community edition to add vector support. Meta has forked MySQL to add features such as the Raft consensus engine, RocksDB, and vector storage. Similarly, JavaScript functions and procedures are currently not supported in the community edition.

The analysis data were extracted from a local clone of the official MySQL server and analyzed using custom Python scripts that leverage formatted git log commands to extract key metrics for each commit.

Related Topics:

• Development
• AI, ML & Data Engineering
• MySQL
• Open Source
• Oracle

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