Or, it will allow them to run complex queries that might have taken too long to run on earlier versions of the database system, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle vice president of MySQL engineering.

The “copyleft” provision of GPLv2 would allow developers to easily create and even sell so-called “forked” versions of MySQL if they become dissatisfied with Oracle’s handling of it.

Oracle pushed out an emergency update back in March for a critical flaw in both the desktop and browser plug-in versions. CVE-2016-0636, which affected Oracle Java SE 7u97, 8u73 and 8u74, scored a ...

Oracle said it's made MySQL 70 times faster than previous versions. The new MySQL Cluster 7.2 database can now do 1.05 billion reads per minute, according to Oracle's benchmarks.

Basically Oracle has made the project less open and the beast has tanked, while at the same time more open versions of the code, such as MariaDB are rising in popularity.

Percona continues to nip at Oracle's heels, releasing a free version of the open-source MySQL 5.6 database with advanced features similar to ones in Oracle's paid enterprise edition.

While the larger MySQL code base remains open source, the new engine will be proprietary and can only be used inside Oracle’s cloud. It won’t be able, at least for now, to be installed locally.