Village News: MySQL News + Events (21 September 2026)
Welcome back. This issue covers five weeks rather than the usual one — the gap since the August issue took in Percona Live Amsterdam, the launch of the OurSQL Foundation, and the run-up to the MySQL Galera Cluster end of life on 30 September.
If you want to get these updates, just subscribe to the blog.
Enjoy!
MySQL News
Note: Aggregated MySQL news can be found at Planet for MySQL Community and Planet MySQL (Oracle curated)
DISTANCE() and VECTOR_DISTANCE(): Vector Similarity in Percona Server for MySQL 9.7 MySQL Performance Blog, Percona
TL;DR - Percona Server for MySQL 9.7.2-2 adds a DISTANCE() function with COSINE, EUCLIDEAN, MANHATTAN and DOT metrics, so embeddings can be ranked in SQL. ANN indexing is still to come.
Using DuckDB inside MySQL VillageSQL
TL;DR - A new VillageSQL Server extension runs DuckDB queries from inside MySQL and joins the results with MySQL result sets, aimed at querying Parquet and other analytical formats in place.
Group Replication Beyond a Single Cluster: DC-DR with Percona (PS MySQL) Operator MySQL Performance Blog, Percona
TL;DR - Percona's PS MySQL Operator v1.2.0 adds cross-site replication for Group Replication/InnoDB Cluster topologies. The post walks through wiring a DR cluster to a primary one.
Traceability Matters: Gopal Shankar on Opening Up MySQL Development for the Next Decade Roberto V. Zicari, ODBMS.org
TL;DR - Oracle's Gopal Shankar explains the reasoning behind moving Enterprise-tier features into Community Edition and what "opening up" MySQL development is meant to mean in practice.
Vector search in MySQL: an early look at HNSW and custom indexes in VillageSQL VillageSQL
TL;DR - MySQL 9.x ships a VECTOR type but no distance function and no vector index. This post covers an HNSW index built through VillageSQL's custom index support.
Performance improvements in Percona Server 8.4.11-11 MySQL Performance Blog, Percona
TL;DR - A read/write benchmark breakdown of what changed in Percona Server for MySQL 8.4.11-11. It follows the earlier "Performance Progression of Percona Server for MySQL 8.4", which is worth reading first.
Diagnosing MySQL Memory Problems with Jemalloc Libing Song
TL;DR - Performance Schema memory instrumentation is too coarse to find many leaks. This walks through using jemalloc's profiling to locate where MySQL memory actually goes.
Percona releases Galera Cluster Version 9.7 Oli Sennhauser, FromDual
TL;DR - Percona has shipped Galera Cluster 9.7 for MySQL, after MariaDB Corporation acquired Codership and announced the end of support for Galera Cluster for MySQL 8.4 this September.
Introducing MySQL Workbench 26 Oracle MySQL Group
TL;DR - Workbench 26.7 is the first release of a rebuilt Workbench on a MySQL Shell foundation, replacing the end-of-life C++ Workbench 8. A companion post covers five things to try in it.
Advanced Cryptography in MySQL with vsql-crypto VillageSQL
TL;DR - The vsql-crypto extension brings common backend cryptography into MySQL itself: hashing stored passwords, signing payloads for downstream verification, and keeping a column unreadable outside the database.
OAuth2 and JWT Logins for MySQL VillageSQL
TL;DR - A VillageSQL extension that authenticates MySQL logins from OAuth2 and JWT tokens, so database access is revoked along with a departing engineer's single sign-on instead of being maintained separately in the database.
OpenID Connect Authentication for MySQL, Now Fully Open Source MySQL Performance Blog, Percona
TL;DR - Percona Server for MySQL now ships an open source OIDC authentication plugin, letting accounts authenticate against any standards-compliant identity provider, from 8.4.11-11 and 9.7.2-2.
Introducing the OurSQL Foundation OurSQL Foundation
TL;DR - A re-launch of the OurSQL Foundation website.
MySQL CPU and CSPU Versioning for More Frequent Security Updates The Oracle MySQL Blog
TL;DR - Oracle is adding monthly Critical Security Patch Update releases alongside the quarterly CPU cycle, issued only when a critical security or stability fix warrants one.
Announcing VillageSQL Server 0.0.6 VillageSQL
TL;DR - VillageSQL Server 0.0.6 moves the mainline to MySQL Server 8.4.11 and adds support for MySQL Server 9.7.2 and Percona Server 8.4.10.
MySQL Galera Cluster EOL: Your Practical Paths Forward Continuent
TL;DR - MySQL Galera Cluster reaches end of life on 30 September 2026. Five migration paths compared — MariaDB Galera, PXC, self-managed MySQL, managed cloud MySQL and Tungsten Cluster. A companion post covers the cost of delaying the decision.
Database News
The architecture of Neki PlanetScale
TL;DR - PlanetScale's sharded Postgres, from the team behind Vitess, is in platform preview. Companion posts cover the router, the lifecycle of a sharded query, and a 118.5M queries/sec benchmark across 512 shards.
Evaluating LLM models for DBA tasks Percona Database Blog
TL;DR - A purpose-built harness measuring how well current LLMs handle real database administration tasks, rather than general systems admin.
Introducing TIN: full-text search for Postgres Patrick Reynolds, PlanetScale
TL;DR - TIN is a new full-text search index for Postgres. A follow-up introduces Lead, a feature-equivalent version you can run in CI.
Announcing ProxySQL 3.0.11, 3.1.11, and 4.0.11 ProxySQL
TL;DR - Three parallel releases improving multiplexing, causal reads, modern authentication, fast-forward/TSDB reliability and MCP operations. ProxySQL.Cloud, a SaaS control plane for MySQL and Postgres, was also announced this month.
Upcoming Database Events
MySQL BR Conf 2026 (VillageSQL is a sponsor) September 26, 2026 São Paulo, Brazil
Postgres Summit US (formerly PGConf.NYC) September 30 – October 2, 2026 (PgUS) New York City, NY
High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS) October 4-7, 2026 Asilomar Conference Grounds Pacific Grove, CA
Open Source Summit Europe October 7-9, 2026 Prague, Czechia
All Things Open 2026 October 19-20, 2026 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, NC
PGConf.EU October 20–23, 2026 (PostgreSQL Europe) Valencia, Spain
Oracle AI World October 25–28, 2026 Las Vegas, NV
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America (VillageSQL is a sponsor) November 9-12, 2026 Salt Lake City, Utah
Open Source Summit Japan December 7-9, 2026 Tokyo, Japan
FOSDEM 2027 January 30-31, 2027 ULB Solbosch Campus Brussels, Belgium
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2027 March 15-18, 2027 Barcelona, Spain
SCaLE 24x April 1-4, 2027 Pasadena Convention Center Pasadena, CA
