Hidden changes indeed... I'm glad Oracle did a blog post about this, because otherwise it's largely missing from the MySQL documentation. This is really disappointing considering that 9.6 was released over two weeks ago, yet as of this moment:

* The new innodb_native_foreign_keys server variable has only two vague sentences describing its effect: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.6/en/innodb-parameters.ht...

* The MySQL 9.6 release notes make no mention of foreign key changes whatsoever, nor of the innodb_native_foreign_keys variable: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/9.6/en/news-9-6-0.h...

* The "What is New in MySQL 9.6" manual page is currently just a copy-and-paste of that page from MySQL 9.5, with all the "9.5"'s replaced with "9.6": https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.6/en/mysql-nutshell.html vs https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/9.5/en/mysql-nutshell.html

As an independent software vendor providing solutions focused on MySQL, honestly I find this situation to be deeply concerning.

I have heard that an Oracle exec made a lot of promises about renewed MySQL Community Edition attention at a pre-FOSDEM event a few days ago; can we take any of that seriously if even basic documentation updates are not occurring?

I think it's a good idea, as a decades long user of InnoDB. I hope that the work can be shared with other forks of MySQL

yeah but it's Oracle. You want MariaDB now.

I mean great, but there are 0 commits in 2026 Github for MySQL. I think pretty much everyone is planning a transition to MariaDB or Postgres.

MySQL is a beloved OSS product and project. Losing influence over that would be a massive mistake by Oracle.

Citation: https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/commits/trunk/