The Reactive Foundation, a community of leaders established to accelerate technologies for building the next generation of networked applications, today announced that the R2DBC project (“Reactive Relational Database Connectivity”) has joined the Reactive Foundation.

Reactive programming aims to build applications that maintain a consistent user experience regardless of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance, and different end-user devices (computers, tablets, smartphones, and other devices). Reactive programming uses a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, scalability, and responsiveness that is required for today’s networked cloud-native applications, independent of their underlying infrastructure.

R2DBC is a specification effort for end-to-end reactive integration with SQL databases on the JVM. Since its inception in early 2018, R2DBC went through an initial specification phase and released a first version of the specification that allows typical SQL interaction patterns. Since then, numerous R2DBC drivers have been implemented by the community, consisting of individuals and database vendors.

R2DBC drivers are available for Google Cloud Spanner, H2Database, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres. Oracle announced recently to release their driver implementation soon.

R2DBC enables an entirely new set of applications that can benefit from reactive programming by using a stream-oriented approach. Use cases contain database notifications such as Pub/Sub, streaming of change data captures, and typical SQL interaction patterns.

As of today, R2DBC has become an open standard for reactive programming on the JVM and integrating with SQL databases. Moving R2DBC into the Reactive Foundation puts the specification under the formal umbrella of a foundation. Previously, R2DBC was hosted by a community of interested individuals. The new home at Reactive Foundation fosters a healthy and vendor-neutral eco-system along with a foundation governance model. Users and contributors can expect further evolution of the R2DBC specification on neutral ground while keeping R2DBC’s goals in mind.