MariaDB Foundation Newsletter – September 2026
August belonged to transparency: MariaDB published its governance framework, and the first contribution statistics report in over a year put numbers on who actually builds the server. Meanwhile the Q3 maintenance releases arrived for all four supported LTS series, the first round without 10.6, and two new sponsors joined along the way. Here’s what happened.
Lead story
MariaDB Server publishes its governance framework
Open source begins with access to the code, but infrastructure that is expected to last for decades needs more: clarity on how responsibility is assigned, how decisions are made, and what happens when people disagree or move on. MariaDB Server now has a publicly documented governance framework covering technical roles, subsystem ownership, decision-making, response expectations and continuity.
As Anna Widenius explains in her guide, the framework formalises much of how the project has long worked, with one central principle: authority should be visible, earned and connected to responsibility.
For anyone evaluating MariaDB for the long haul, this is the document to bookmark.
Sponsor roundup: Auree and Seravo join as Silver Sponsors
Auree joins as Silver Sponsor (10 Aug). Auree is building a cloud-independent platform for deploying and operating highly available open source databases, including MariaDB, inside customers’ own cloud accounts. Its Bring Your Own Cloud model automates provisioning, monitoring, backups, clustering and failover while organisations keep control of provider, region and security environment. Announcement
Seravo becomes a Silver Sponsor (18 Aug). The Finland-based specialist in premium hosting and upkeep for WordPress and WooCommerce has run on MariaDB for many years; the sponsorship turns a long-standing ecosystem relationship into formal support for MariaDB’s future. Announcement
Thank you to both: your support keeps MariaDB Server independent and community-led.
Development
JSON arrow operators arrive in the MariaDB 13.1 preview
This month’s feature in focus is small in syntax and large in daily convenience. MariaDB 13.1 introduces the JSON arrow operators, so you can finally write document->'$.customer.name' and document->>'$.customer.name' instead of wrapping everything in function calls. The 13.1 preview also improves JSON_TABLE() with support for formatted JSON columns, letting complete JSON objects and arrays be returned without flattening them into scalar SQL values.
MariaDB 13.1 Feature in Focus: JSON Operators and JSON_TABLE Improvements (13 Aug) →
Laying the groundwork for HyperLogLog
MariaDB has long allowed pluggable data types and scalar plugin functions. The missing piece was pluggable aggregate functions that operate on those types, exactly what an extension like HyperLogLog needs to aggregate values into a statistical sketch while preserving its native SQL type. Roman Nozdrin’s post walks through MDEV-40672, which closes that architectural gap: aggregate plugins can now participate in MariaDB’s native aggregation infrastructure, including DISTINCT, window execution and prepared statements.
Extending MariaDB with Native Aggregate Plugins (16 Aug) →
When your benchmark tool is the one leaking memory
While validating MariaDB’s memory stability under stored procedure workloads, Jonathan Miller found unexpected RSS growth. MariaDB stayed stable; the benchmark tool did not. The investigation led to an update of the Foundation’s Test Automation Framework to support HammerDB 6.0, plus a new RSS logging script for long-duration runs.
MariaDB Foundation Advances TAF with HammerDB 6.0 (14 Aug) →
Releases
Q3 2026 maintenance releases: the first round without 10.6
On 24 August, updates shipped for all four currently maintained Long Term Support series: MariaDB 12.3.3, 11.8.9, 11.4.13 and 10.11.19, with bug fixes and stability improvements across the server.
If the list feels shorter than usual, that’s intentional: MariaDB 10.6 reached End of Life on 6 July and is no longer part of the maintenance cycle. If you are still running 10.6, the supported upgrade targets are 10.11, 11.4, 11.8 and the current LTS, 12.3.
Release announcement and changelogs (25 Aug) →
Community
Who builds MariaDB? The numbers for January–June 2026
After a long pause, contribution statistics reporting is back, now in the hands of Georgi Kodinov. The first-half 2026 breakdown counts contributions from a dozen organisations, led by MariaDB plc (34 contributors, 807 commits) and the MariaDB Foundation (7 contributors, 146 commits). The number worth dwelling on: 40 independent contributors landed 78 commits, alongside contributions from Google Summer of Code students, Amazon, Red Hat, Arch Linux and others.
That long tail of independent and corporate contributors is what a healthy open source database looks like.
MariaDB Contribution Statistics, January–June 2026 (25 Aug) →
The database people finally showed up in Prague
At Meet Magento Czech in Prague on 27 August, the database people finally showed up. Adobe’s decision to make MariaDB the default database for Adobe Commerce is settled; what it opens is the conversation. Representing MariaDB, Monty Widenius and Roman Nozdrin shared database expertise with the Magento community: how moving analytics workloads to the DuckDB storage engine can reduce total cost of ownership, and how MariaDB’s vector index can bring state-of-the-art semantic search without additional infrastructure.
MariaDB, hiding in plain sight
After a season of conversations with WordPress and WooCommerce hosts, Magento specialists and managed infrastructure providers, Anna Widenius shared an observation worth sitting with: a huge amount of database usage never starts with somebody choosing a database. The customer chooses WordPress hosting, or WooCommerce, or a VPS, and somewhere underneath, quietly doing its job, is MariaDB. Technology rankings built from mentions, job posts and surveys cannot see a database running under a hosting fleet, which may make web hosting one of the most undercounted parts of the MariaDB ecosystem.
Her request to the hosting world: if MariaDB quietly powers a meaningful part of your platform, make it visible. The Cloud & Hosting section of the Ecosystem Hub is where that starts: far more hosts run MariaDB than are listed there today, and a listing is free. If you have built an opinionated MariaDB-based stack, a WooCommerce setup, an optimized Adobe Commerce architecture, the Hub’s solution stacks section is where that operational knowledge belongs.
Around the ecosystem
Oracle MySQL
MySQL turns to its community for vector search. On 3 August Oracle published “MySQL Development as it Happens,” a progress report on the community roadmap now hosted on GitHub. Top of the list is a native vector index: the design is still open, with HNSW and Google’s ScaNN both under discussion. MariaDB’s native vector search has been GA since early 2025, after preview releases in 2024, built on a modified HNSW index, and its performance has an external record: Mark Callaghan’s ann-benchmarks runs have tracked it since January 2025, finding more queries per second than pgvector at a given recall, sometimes three times more, with index builds roughly twice as fast, and in February 2026 MariaDB 12.3 faster again than 11 against Postgres 18.2 with pgvector 0.8.1. A ten-database comparison published on mariadb.org in March put MariaDB in the fastest group, ahead of pgvectorscale, Weaviate, Qdrant and Milvus. If the MySQL team is looking for a reference implementation, there is a well-tested one in the family. The rest of the roadmap will feel familiar to MariaDB users too: system-versioned tables, which have shipped in MariaDB since 10.3, and a DuckDB storage engine, proposed by Alibaba; MariaDB’s own arrived in June. Good ideas travel across the ecosystem in both directions. The update · Mark Callaghan’s benchmarks · The ten-database comparison
VillageSQL
VillageSQL 0.0.6. The MySQL fork built around an extension framework, launched in February, shipped 0.0.6 on 26 August: the mainline moves to MySQL 8.4.11, with support for 9.7.2 and Percona Server 8.4.10, and extensions can now handle authentication. Its August community roundup, incidentally, points readers to MariaDB’s governance guide and aggregate-plugin work, a fair sign that the extensibility conversation is a shared one. Release post
Percona
OpenID Connect lands in Percona Server for MySQL. Percona Server for MySQL 8.4.11-11, released 20 August, adds OIDC authentication and authorization: users can authenticate with identity tokens from external identity providers instead of MySQL passwords, with IDP group-to-role mapping and runtime JWKS key refresh. Release notes
Percona explains its “no 9.x Innovation Releases” decision. Following up on its July decision to skip the 9.x Innovation releases, Evgeniy Patlan published the full reasoning on 7 August: telemetry from Percona Monitoring and Management shows adoption of Innovation Releases barely registering, fluctuating within a 1% range, so Percona is moving its MySQL products directly to the 9.7 LTS line. The write-up
Worth reading
An interview at ODBMS.org with Ilia Kors on why Aqtra chose MariaDB as the native foundation of its enterprise platform, and why a young company invests in the Foundation at Gold level rather than treating MariaDB as just a dependency. Building on Open Ground
Upcoming events
9–11 Sep 2026 · Percona Live (Foundation booth) · Amsterdam, The Netherlands
19–20 Sep 2026 · Nextcloud Community Conference 2026 · Berlin, Germany
22–26 Sep 2026 · Nerdearla Buenos Aires · Buenos Aires, Argentina
26 Sep 2026 · MySQL BR Conf 2026 · São Paulo, Brazil
7–8 Oct 2026 · Open Source India · Bengaluru, India
7–9 Oct 2026 · Open Source Summit Europe · Prague, Czechia
24 Oct 2026 · BuildDevCon – Vector Databases · Online
Full listing at mariadb.org/events
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