10:00 am – 10:20 am – Registration with Coffee, Bagels, and Danishes
10:30 am – 11:30 am – The Path to MySQL Open Innovation
Heather VanCura, Oracle and Andrew Bowles, Amazon Guest
As MySQL celebrates its 30-year milestone, it faces a defining moment in its evolution. As we look toward the next era of MySQL, there are opportunities to increase community engagement, collaboration, contributions, and innovation velocity.
Oracle and the MySQL Community are embarking on a bold transformation—reimagining how one of the world’s most widely used open-source databases is built, governed, and evolved.
This session shares details on the next phase of that transformation following the MySQL 9.7 Community Edition release. Sparked by direct community feedback about the future of MySQL as an open ecosystem, this journey led to a multi-phase strategy to modernize MySQL’s development model.
Heather VanCura is a senior leader in community engagement and open-source strategy and developer relations at Oracle; she has a focus on advancing MySQL’s evolution through open collaboration, modern development practices, and ecosystem growth. With extensive experience in community building and open governance, she has been instrumental in fostering stronger connections between engineering teams and the global community. Heather is a recognized advocate for open-source innovation, helping drive initiatives that increase transparency, accelerate contributions, and shape the future of data platforms.
11:30 am -12:35 pm – Networking Lunch and RMOUG Announcements
12:35 pm – 1:35 pm – The Next Chapter of MySQL: What’s new in Version 9.7
Scott Stroz, Oracle
MySQL 9.7 LTS marks a major milestone for MySQL Community Edition, delivering expanded capabilities across observability, high availability, application development, and query performance.
In this session, Scott Stroz, Developer Advocate on the MySQL team, explores the Community Edition features introduced in MySQL 9.7 LTS and what they mean for teams building and operating MySQL-backed systems. You will learn how new replication and Group Replication observability features provide better insight into lag, flow control, cluster health, and failover behavior; how OpenTelemetry support helps integrate MySQL into modern monitoring pipelines; how JSON Duality Views continue to evolve for application architectures; and how the Hypergraph Optimizer broadens access to advanced query planning in Community Edition.
This session is a practical look at what is now available in MySQL Community Edition, why these features matter, and how they can help teams build, scale, monitor, and optimize MySQL-backed applications with more confidence.
1:35 pm – 1:45 pm – Break
1:45 pm – 2:45 pm – MySQL: From System of Record to Foundation for AI Applications
Scott Stroz, Oracle
This session explores how MySQL is evolving beyond its traditional role as a transactional database to become a foundational component of modern AI architectures. The presentation demonstrates why enterprise AI applications require more than vector search, highlighting the importance of trusted relational data, JSON document support, metadata, security, observability, and governance. It examines practical AI patterns—including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI agents, and hybrid vector search architectures—that combine MySQL with technologies such as FAISS and specialized vector databases. The session also showcases innovations like JSON Relational Duality Views, discusses MySQL’s role in AI observability and telemetry, and provides a forward-looking perspective on native vector capabilities.
Attendees will gain a practical understanding of how MySQL can serve as the trusted data foundation for scalable, enterprise-ready AI applications while leveraging existing SQL and cloud ecosystems.
Scott Stroz, Developer Advocate on the MySQL team has been writing full-stack applications since before “full-stack” was a thing. Technologies have come and gone, stacks have evolved, and frameworks have had their moment, but MySQL has remained a constant throughout his career. He loves sharing what he has learned, including the mistakes, lessons, and unexpected discoveries that have shaped his journey as a developer.