🐬 MySQL NYC: Open Innovation Meets AI
About the event
MySQL Community Meetup New York
Join us for an evening MySQL meetup in New York City, hosted at the Chrysler Building.
This meetup will bring together MySQL users, developers, DBAs, contributors, and community members for MySQL updates, technical sessions, discussion, and networking. Pizza and refreshments will be provided.
If you don't have a meetup account, you can fill [this form for RSVP](https://forms.gle/HnHf7SVfcDJkQVPa9). ----- Location *ID Is required to enter the building*
*Chrysler Building - 9th Floor* 405 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10174
Time
• September 16, 2026 • 17:30–20:00 EDT • Doors open at 17:30
Agenda
• 17:30 – Doors open / networking • 18:00–18:05 – Welcome – Gabi • 18:05–18:55 – *The Path to MySQL Open Innovation* – Heather VanCura • 18:55–19:00 – Short break / Pizza • 19:00–19:40 – *MySQL for AI, Present and Future* – Philip Antoniades • 19:40–20:00 – End of meetup / networking
Featured session: The Path to MySQL Open Innovation Heather VanCura, Vice President of External Standards and Community Engagement at Oracle, will share the next phase of MySQL community engagement and open innovation.
As MySQL celebrates its 30-year milestone, the community is entering a new phase focused on broader participation, collaboration, contributions, and faster innovation. Heather will discuss how Oracle and the MySQL community are building the future of MySQL together through greater roadmap transparency, open collaboration, modern development practices, and new ways for users, contributors, and partners to get involved.
The session will also cover the multi-phase strategy to modernize the MySQL development model, launched following the MySQL 9.7 Community Edition release and shaped by direct community feedback on the future of MySQL as an open ecosystem.
Heather leads Oracle's global engagement in standards organizations and open-source projects, as well as MySQL community engagement initiatives. Her work connects Oracle engineering teams with developers, user groups, and contributors around the world.
Technical session: MySQL for AI, Present and Future
Philip Antoniades, who leads Oracle's Global MySQL Solution Engineering team, will explore MySQL 9.7 as a foundation for an open-source, privacy-first AI harness.
Local AI needs more than a model runner. It also needs a reliable way to track models, prompts, runs, evaluations, jobs, and the data boundaries around them. This session looks at how MySQL can support these needs when it's already your system of record, when data has to stay local, or when deployment needs to run at the edge. ----- See you there!
