Re: Oracle RIF effects on MySQL ?
Sheryl, this is a real concern and you're not alone in feeling it. The numbers back up what you're seeing on the support side. Estimates put the MySQL engineering cuts around 50 to 70% of the team, and Monty Widenius himself posted publicly that he was heartbroken by it. Peter Zaitsev from Percona was more direct and said it looks like another step toward Oracle slowly killing the Community Edition.
On the "what to do now" question, a few things worth tracking. First, theres an active effort led by Percona, PlanetScale, and engineers from companies like DigitalOcean and Pinterest to push for a non profit MySQL foundation independent of Oracle. They published an open letter (you can find it at letter.3306-db.org) with 248+ signatures calling for Oracle to either co govern or let the community take over. They're targeting a governance decision by end of March 2026 and a foundation launch in Q3. That might sound slow but it tells you serious people are working on this, not just complaining.
Second, practically speaking: MariaDB is not the easy swap it used to be. It diverged significantly from MySQL over the past few years and they're honestly no longer drop in replacements for each other. Percona Server for MySQL tracks the upstream MySQL codebase much more closely and adds enterprise features on top, so if you want to stay in the MySQL ecosystem with actual support that might be the more realistic path. They also provide their own support contracts.
Third, MySQL 8.0 hits end of life in April 2026 (https://www.mysql.com/support/eol-notice.html) If you haven't moved to 8.4 LTS yet, that clock is ticking regardless of the layoff situation. And with a gutted team the quality of any final 8.0 patches is a legitimate question.
For the longer term, a lot of teams are evaluating PostgreSQL as the exit ramp, and honestly the ecosystem around Postgres (Supabase, Neon, managed offerings on every cloud) has gotten strong enough that it's a viable path for most workloads. The migration is not trivial though, especially with stored procedures, authentication plugin differences, and any MySQL specific SQL syntax your applications depend on. If you go that route tools like Stacksync or pgLoader can help with the actual data movement but plan for application level changes too.
I wouldnt panic and migrate tomorrow, but I also wouldnt wait for Amazon to share their MySQL work. Like you said, they historically dont. Keep an eye on the foundation effort and start evaluating Percona support as an immediate safety net for your paid support gap.