Open source MySQL repository has no commits in more than three months

Oracle-owned MySQL, whose website claims it to be the “world’s most popular open source database,” has received no commits to its GitHub repository for MySQL Server since September last year, reinforcing concerns that it is now neglected by its sponsors.

The pause in commits coincides with reported layoffs in the MySQL team at Oracle. At the time, Peter Zaitsev, CEO of database solutions company Percona, speculated on LinkedIn that it could be “another significant step by Oracle towards slowly killing MySQL Community edition.”

Oracle acquired MySQL as part of Sun Microsystems in 2010. Work on the database manager continued at a steady pace in the early years after the acquisition, despite the code being forked by Michael (“Monty”) Widenius, the original creator of MySQL, as MariaDB.

Since 2019 though, the number of commits has declined year by year, as charted by Julia Vural, software engineering manager at Percona. In 2025, commits fell to their lowest number since the beginnings of the project in 2000/2001.

Oracle markets other products based on MySQL, including an enterprise edition with proprietary extensions, a distributed Cluster edition, and the cloud-hosted Heatwave. Lack of activity in the open source repository may mean that the company is mainly focused on these proprietary versions. The open source MySQL is licensed under GPL (GNU General Public License) version 2.

Otto Kekäläinen, formerly a software development manager at AWS working on RDS (Relational Database Service), and before that CEO of MariaDB Foundation, posted on the decline in git commits for MySQL, claiming that MySQL is “open source only by license, but not as a project.” He recommended that developers switch to other database managers such as MariaDB or PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL is today’s developer favorite among open source database servers, with a strong community of contributors. Key PostgreSQL assets are owned by a non-profit community association, and the project is supported by non-profit organizations in Europe and the US. That said, migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL can be challenging thanks to many differences in the SQL dialect and database structure.

Despite worries about its open source future, MySQL remains among the most popular database engines. In April last year, Microsoft retired its Azure database for MariaDB in favour of MySQL, giving no clear reason but stating that “the MariaDB offering needs to be retired and upgraded with a new architecture.”

Measuring the popularity of a database engine is not easy. Users of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack may not be aware of whether MySQL or MariaDB is in use by a WordPress hosting provider, for example. DB Engines has a ranking system which places Oracle first and MySQL second, but this is not based on a count of installations, but rather on general interest such as the number of searches and social media posts. Discussion of the decline of MySQL might actually improve its DB Rankings place.

The most recent Stack Overflow survey, which looks at what professional developers say they are using, ranks PostgreSQL top by a wide margin, followed by MySQL, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server.

The developers of SQLite reckon it to be the most widely deployed database with upwards of one trillion databases “in active use.”

MySQL is not going away, but usage is likely to decline if the open source project remains moribund.