In the Java world, the Spring framework is about to drop a new major release revolving around asynchronous or "reactive" programming. Many other programming languages and frameworks are already moving in this direction.
This model pulls people toward alternative databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. Because you lose many of the advantages of asynchronous processing in the application tier, if your data access tier still relies on synchronous blocking API's (such as Java's JDBC and JPA).
Recently I was researching whether any relational database vendors were adding support for asynchronous access, and stumbled across MySQL's new "X Protocol" basically by accident. The documentation is still rather new and thin, and I was puzzled that it seems to revolve 100% around the use case of MySQL as a document store to compete with MongoDB.
Are there any plans to push the X Protocol further toward the spotlight, beef up the documentation, and emphasize use cases around asynchronous access as a relational database rather than document store?