Oracle has announced that support for JavaScript functions and stored procedures has been added to the MySQL database server. The support is in preview and is currently limited to Oracle's MySQL Enterprise Edition and MySQL Heatwave.

MySQL is an open source relational database that was originally developed by Monty Widenius and David Axmark back in 1994. The commercial version is owned and developed by Oracle following a sequence of company purchases.

Oracle says the support means developers can now write JavaScript stored programs (functions and procedures) in the MySQL database server. The stored programs will be run with the GraalVM run time. MySQL-JavaScript is also available in the MySQL Heatwave cloud service on OCI, AWS and Azure.

Discussing the new support in a blog post, Øystein Grøvlen and Farhan Tauheed of Oracle Technical Staff pointed out the advantages of using stored functions and procedures to minimize data movement between the database server and applications:

"JavaScript stored programs empower developers to sidestep data movement and seamlessly implement advanced data processing logic inside the database with ease."

The traditional language for stored procedures in databases is SQL, and developers can use SQL statements to define data processing within the database server. Oracle says the addition of support for JavaScript stored programs means users can "express rich procedural logic inside the database". The JavaScript runtime is integrated via GraalVM, where the user can use all GraalVM's Enterprise Edition (EE) features such as compiler optimizations, performance, and security features at no additional cost.

This release has support for JavaScript based on ECMAScript 2021, including the ECMAScript standard library which includes also opens millions of available third party packages from online package managers such as npm.

GraalVM is an Oracle compiler eco-system that includes JDK, language implementations such as JavaScript, R, Python, Ruby and Java. It includes just-in-time (JIT) and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation technology.  It also provides a fully managed virtual machine with sandboxing capability and tooling support. MySQL-JavaScript is integrated with GraalVM Enterprise edition.

There has been no announcement on whether JavaScript support for stored procedures will be added to the community edition.

More Information

MySQL Website

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