Wim Coekaerts, Executive Vice President of Software Development at Oracle joins Fred and Scott for the inaugural episode of Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks. Wim gives us an update on the "State of the Dolphin" and discussed where MySQL fits into the landscape.

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Episode Transcript:

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Welcome to Inside MySQL: Sakila Speaks, a podcast dedicated to all things MySQL. We bring you the latest news from the MySQL team, MySQL product updates and insightful interviews with members of the MySQL community. Sit back and enjoy as your hosts bring you the latest updates on your favorite open-source database. Let's get started.
 
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Hello and welcome to Sakila Speaks, our new podcast, dedicated to MySQL I'm Scott Stroz and I am leFred. Who better than Wim Coekaerts to be the very first guest on our new podcast. Wim is the Executive Vice President of Software Development at Oracle, is a well-known developer in the open-source community and a leader in several projects such as Oracle, Linux and Virtualization.
 
00;00;54;12 - 00;01;16;08
Oracle Enterprise Manager, MySQL and Heat Wave and various cloud services. Wim has a degree in Computer Science and from the University Catholique the Leuven in Belgium and has been working at Oracle since 1995. Wim, thank you for joining us today. We're really excited to hear about your work and your insights on the Dolphin database. Thanks Scott and thank you, Fred.
 
00;01;16;15 - 00;01;39;03
It's great to be here, happy to open the first podcast. So, Wim, what excites you most about MYSQL right now? Oh, there's some stuff going on, right? So I think the number one thing is the fact that we're doing a very important and great cloud service. And I know that we talk a lot about on premises databases and so forth, and obviously that's very important.
 
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And the reason I mentioned the cloud side is because there's a lot of opportunities that we now have as a development team that allows us to make MySQL much better than it ever was. And the primary driver for that, and when I bring this up is because in cloud we are the DBA, we are the ones that actually have to deploy the server.
 
00;02;01;00 - 00;02;38;13
We have to go and do the backups and understand how that works and set replication and so forth. And it gives us a much better insight into the use of the product than we ever had before. Right? And I think that's the one thing around cloud that ask me the most is that from a development team point of view, working on a product like MySQL server in that we get a lot more input directly instead of working from customer to potentially running into a bug or getting feedback, but there is always a certain amount between the customer and our development teams.
 
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And, so, with cloud we become that customer directly and it gives us a lot more direct experience and a feedback loop that's internal. And, so, a few examples of that would be a first of all, scale, right? We run thousands and thousands of servers now in production, right, for our customers, but we are the ones running it. And, so, we have to deal with performance issues.
 
00;03;04;27 - 00;03;34;24
We have to deal with potentially, you know, bugs that appear, how to debug that and making sure we get these bugs and security vulnerabilities and everything fixed really quickly for that that they're out there. We have a huge test farm, you know larger than ever before again because of the scale of cloud. And we learn a lot about how we can do things more easily because of automation and how to change the product to support that automation.
 
00;03;34;24 - 00;04;01;29
Right? And all of that stuff actually goes back into the product that is known as MySQL Server that, you know, goes both into the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition that that customers and developers can download and install locally. And so, you know, both inside of Oracle and inside the development team and from customers, there's this feedback that says, well, you know, you all need to talk about the cloud development and what's in it for us.
 
00;04;02;16 - 00;04;29;06
And I think that what I just mentioned really is what's in it for everyone else. The bugs we find, the performance issues, we find they all go back into the product. The enhancements we make to simplify things and, you know, feedback from our own use almost back into the server. Of course, when it's applicable to the server and not something more around a control plane in the cloud itself and the orchestration.
 
00;04;29;18 - 00;04;59;04
But there's a lot of that stuff that goes back into the product set itself. And that's you know when I say most excited that's probably the, the number one. Then I would say secondly, you know, we are also doing things that are very innovative. And again, some of this is cloud only, such as working on the heat wave engine and working with machine learning and artificial intelligence integration.
 
00;04;59;05 - 00;05;21;07
So certainly, Gen AI work in vector database support and improving the optimizer for some of this work. And I wanted to point that out again as well. So, as we did Heat Wave, which is specifically tied to the cloud service side, we have to make a great number of changes on the optimizer in MySQL to support that.
 
00;05;21;20 - 00;05;45;23
And by doing these really, really high end incredibly fast areas. And you know of course running benchmarks like TPCH and TPCS and so forth, we learn of a lot of potential deficiencies in the older optimizer. And so now we're working on hyper graph a lot more and where we're enhancing that and that will benefit again everyone else as well.
 
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They use heatwave or not, whether they use the cloud or not. And so anyway, so I think, you know, our development teams are really working on cutting edge stuff. We just released JavaScript support in MySQL in ...on OTN - Oracle Technology Network - for download that everyone can use for testing development freely downloaded, and that brings JavaScript support into MySQL Server itself.
 
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And then of course we have my router which added support for REST API calls a while back. And so, if you think about it, you can now write an application, let's say from your cell phone you have a basically a cell phone app or a mobile phone app that just does REST API calls to MySQL Router and from MySQL Router direct API calls go into the database and your business logic runs in the database itself and gets the data from the database.
 
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So, you don't need a real middle tier anymore. And you can simplify data access and the actual business logic all combined into the server. So, it's pretty unique compared to all the other databases that ask directly competes with the implementation of JavaScript using Graal VM and as some of you might know with Graal VM we might also or will also start supporting other languages in the future.
 
00;07;12;10 - 00;07;42;23
So think about Python in the database and of course Java in the database. Those are all roadmap items. Can't give you specific dates on that because you know, we're just beta, which we had one, but in the end we are moving forward with a good ecosystem of multilingual support in the database directly that supports, you know, a better security model, faster access to data, because the data and the business logic run within the same environment and everything from at with the router.
 
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And then of course, you know, I'd say one last thing here. The VS Code plug in that the team has worked on and since VS Code is one of the most popular IDEs out there today, that of course, you know, it has so much functionality built in now with perf hub support as well as you can see performance data right included in the in the editor and of course direct connectivity with your database.
 
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So there's a really nice ecosystem around developers with VS Code, with the router, with rest APIs you can use or the Oracle REST Database Service as well if you want that supports MySQL as well. And then of course, all the all the stuff that we're doing around cloud and security that ultimately flows into my MySQL server. So it's a very long answer to a short question, but obviously there's tons going on.
 
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Well, when there's a lot of stuff to be excited, it's good to have a long answer. Why do you think MySQL is so popular with the top open-source projects? It always has been, I suppose. Right. And, you know, I think it's just a continuation of the of the past. So,MySQL was really fast and still it's really fast.
 
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It was really simple to get it right next to the list really simple to install and getting up and running. It's so it's really easy to install and it's ubiquitous. It runs on every operating system in every CPU architecture you can think of. And so, if you want to build an app and have flexibility and have a very small footprint, let's say a raspberry Pi, which with for applications running MySQL server, it works just fine and all those areas and because a lot of the drivers are in standard and the standard package is a lot of the libraries support MySQL out of the box open-source tools and open-source libraries and
 
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SDKs and projects there is very little additional development to do to get going with MySQL and