When we were asked to write a blog post, we had no doubt about the topic. We wanted to talk about the state of MySQL ecosystem and the work we are doing around it.
A bit of context about the state of MySQL
For those not watching closely, MySQL has been through some drama lately. Oracle, the project’s sole owner, has been accused of slowing adoption by failing to port features from its commercial offering, not welcoming community contributions, and lacking transparency overall. While we are not here to argue for one side or the other, it is true that MySQL popularity is on a downward trend, with new deployments often preferring PostgreSQL and its vibrant extension ecosystem.
The community
A couple of community players have taken matters into their own hands. For example, the folks at VillageSQL released a tracking fork of MySQL with permissionless extension support. Their vision is to make it easier to build a rich extension ecosystem, similar to PostgreSQL.
Additionally, the folks at Percona have, for several years now, been very vocal about the need for more transparency and community input in MySQL upstream. Percona has published several blog posts over the years outlining their position, but this open letter to Oracle sums it up well.
The tl;dr is simple: Oracle needs to open up MySQL development and allow open innovation, or risk its slow decline.
Oracle’s response
Oracle is listening. Since MySQL Belgium in February this year, Oracle has stated its intent to change its relationship with the community. That goal of making development more transparent and more welcoming to community contributions became more concrete last June, with the announcement of a steering committee.
How we see it
We are participating in some of these discussions while also focusing on the distribution side of things. We would love to see MySQL bounce back in popularity, but given we have limited influence over it, we can facilitate access to it. From the Ubuntu side, we are pushing for upstream adoption of MySQL into Debian. Ubuntu already ships MySQL LTS releases, and our efforts also landed MySQL 9.7 in Debian unstable.
To give users a way to experiment with and use different versions of MySQL across distributions and releases, we offer snaps and rocks.
Right now, users can install MySQL 8.4.x from the stable channel, regardless of Ubuntu version, with:
sudo snap install mysql --channel 8.4/stable
To connect to your newly installed mysql instance, simply run:
sudo mysql
The same is true for MySQL 9.7.x, released on April 2026, and for users interested in the bleeding edge:
sudo snap install mysql --channel 9.7/edge
Alternatively, users who prefer a container runtime can use our rocks.
With your preferred container runtime:
docker run --name mysql-container \
-e TZ=UTC -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=My:S3cr3t -p 30306:3306 \
ubuntu/mysql:8.4-26.04_stable
To connect, leverage the mysql cli from the container, with:
docker exec -it mysql-container mysql -u root --password=My:S3cr3t
Or to test out 9.7 series:
docker run --name mysql-container \
-e TZ=UTC -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=My:S3cr3t -p 30306:3306 \
ghcr.io/canonical/mysql:9.7.1-26.04_edge
These are the kinds of artifacts we want to make easy to consume: consistent, portable, and available across environments. Whether you want the stability of an LTS release or a newer MySQL version for testing, Canonical’s packaging makes it simpler.
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