MariaDB Server turns fifteen!

Fifteen years ago, Internet Explorer made up about two-thirds of all browsers, Firefox the majority of the rest, while a newly-released browser called Chrome was starting to appear in the rankings.

Fifteen years ago, iPhone OS overtook Windows Mobile in worldwide smartphone market share, but still trailed the giants of Blackberry’s RIM and Symbian, used by market leader Nokia, while Google’s new Android ecosystem was just starting to show signs of momentum.

And in the database world, as Oracle moved to acquire MySQL, a new upstart called MariaDB was born as a fork of MySQL, birthed by MySQL founder Monty Widenius with the support of many of the original MySQL developers.

In fact, today’s exactly fifteen years since our first release! On 29 October 2009, MariaDB 5.1.38 was released. It featured numerous speed improvements over MySQL, an enhanced thread pool, and made use of the XtraDB and Aria (then called Maria) storage engines.

We spent the day celebrating our recent appearance in a country, and in particular city, that’s unrecognisable from fifteen years ago. Moving from its Garden City roots, Bangalore today is known as the Silicon Valley of India, and brings in most of the country’s IT revenue. Over one million of its residents are developers, and there are well over 100 IT colleges. Monty gave a keynote at the Open Source India event, and the Foundation had a number of packed talks and a stand that struggled to keep up with the demand for information about MariaDB, even with more than five people present. We followed that up with a MariaDB Server Fest.

So join us with some cake, perhaps some of Monty’s ubiquitous black vodka, and if you haven’t yet, try out our recent 11.7.0 preview release, featuring MariaDB Vector Search among other new features.

We can’t wait to see what the next fifteen years have in store for MariaDB Server: the innovative open source database!

Update: MariaDB plc also celebrated our birthday with a post MariaDB Server Turns 15! Here Are 15 Reasons Why Developers and DBAs Love It. Go check it out.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Sources