Oracle has recently announced MySQL AI, a new set of AI-powered capabilities available exclusively in the MySQL Enterprise edition, targeting analytics and AI workloads in large deployments. Concerns are rising throughout the MySQL community over the future of the popular Community edition, amid fears of vendor lock-in and following recent internal layoffs.
The new MySQL AI introduces vector store and search capabilities, enabling enterprises to build retrieval-augmented generation applications directly on MySQL without the need for separate vector databases. It also integrates with leading large language models, provides AI-powered query acceleration, and leverages in-database analytics to optimize workloads. Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of MySQL engineering at Oracle, explains:
MySQL AI enables a number of on-premise agentic workflows such as financial fraud detection for bank transactions stored on your servers, monitoring of store inventory and forecasting demand for goods, travel bookings for customers, to name a few. You can develop AI applications accessing data from the MySQL database or file system without requiring data movement or complex integrations, with the option to migrate the same application to MySQL HeatWave in the cloud.
Source: Oracle documentation
There are four key components of the new AI Engine: Generative AI, enabling users to extract accurate and contextually relevant information from their documents in local file systems; Vector Engine, allowing developers to create vectors from documents and store them in a vector store in InnoDB; AutoML, automating common training tasks such as algorithm selection, data sampling, feature selection, and hyperparameter optimization; finally, NL2SQL, a text to SQL functionality using LLMs to let developers query database content in natural language.
As MySQL Enterprise provides native support for JavaScript stored programs, developers can use the GenAI APIs to write JavaScript code that interacts directly with MySQL data. Finally, MySQL Studio is a new unified interface for working with MySQL AI. Agarwal adds:
MySQL Studio is a new visual interface for MySQL AI which provides an intuitive, integrated environment with a SQL worksheet, a chat interface for querying documents in the vector store, and an interactive notebook for developing ML and GenAI applications.
The new interactive notebooks are compatible with Jupyter, allowing developers to import or share existing notebooks. The announcement follows the recent layoffs and Oracle’s AI focus on MySQL HeatWave, the managed MySQL Enterprise database service on OCI, with the community questioning the future of MySQL as an open source project. Patrik Backman, CEO at OpenOcean and MariaDB co-founder, comments:
MySQL’s original promise was openness and freedom from lock-in (…) The features enterprises want most — analytics, ML, vector — are now increasingly locked into HeatWave. Staying with Oracle means deeper dependency on OCI.
There are fears in the community that Oracle is increasingly locking new features behind paid licensing and reducing support for the open-source version. Backman adds:
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? (…) This is not just “Oracle being Oracle.” It’s a strategic shift. And for enterprises, the cost of inaction may soon outweigh the cost of change.
Open source database expert Mark Callaghan warns:
I hope that Oracle continues to invest in MySQL. It is good for the community and good for their funnel into Heatwave, because the funnel doesn’t work if users stop using open-source MySQL.
A trial download for MySQL AI is available on Oracle E-Delivery. The team has released a video introducing MySQL Studio and a demo showing travel booking with an MCP server for MySQL AI.
