 WebScaleSQL was created as a branch of the MySQL's latest production-ready community release, which was version 5.6 .As the project aimed to tightly follow new MySQL community releases, a branching path was selected instead of becoming a software fork of MySQL.The selection of MySQL production-ready community releases for the WebScaleSQL's upstream, instead of selecting some of the available MySQL forks was the result of a consensus between the four founding companies, which concluded that the features already existing in MySQL 5.6 are suitable for large-scale deployments, while additional features of the same kind are planned for MySQL 5.7.