Riding the Waves – the MariaDB adoption index in October 2025

Even positive trends have hiccups. Last month we celebrated “onwards and upwards”. This month the adoption index took a bit of a knock. We also made a couple of minor updates to the index thanks to feedback from the community. This is all in the spirit of openness – with transparent numbers, we can together tackle challenges and work on the success of MariaDB. 

Highlights in metrics

Metrics that rose considerably this month: MariaDB in Debian popcon, Github stars, mentions in Github Repo READMEs, Wikipedia article reads, and Reddit subscribers. 

It is positive to see views of MariaDB articles on Wikipedia take a positive swing. The Wikipedia trend in general has been stagnant or even negative, given that people use AI more and more in situations where they earlier went to Wikipedia. 

A metric with a large weight that took a drop was docker official image pulls. The monthly pulls have been rising considerably for several months, and Docker has thus become a major part of the index, so fluctuations will be showing strongly in the total. At some point we may need to reconsider Docker’s weight within the total index. 

Actions taken thanks to feedback and metrics

An active community member critically looked through the previous adoption index and provided some feedback: 

X: Followers on X have been dropping steadily for a long while. While X on one hand has a negative trend, we also have issues accessing MariaDB Foundation’s account currently, which does not help our presence on X. 

Mastodon: An alternative to X is Mastodon – MariaDB Foundation has an account on Fosstodon, with a following that has been growing steadily. Thanks to feedback, we added a Mastodon icon to our social icons on mariadb.org – so maybe more people will be finding it in the future. 

Stackexchange: We realized that our “new questions on Stackexchange tagged mariadb” metric was actually limited to only the Stackoverflow platform on Stackexchange. We changed the script to now go through all platforms, including Stackoverflow, DBA, “chess”, and more. We have now changed the historical metric to reflect the name correctly. This actually increased Stackexchange’s negative trend, but that’s life. 

New metrics to consider? 

We are looking into new suggested metrics: “brew install mariadb”, Slack channel members, and open alternatives to reddit:  https://lemmy.ml/c/mariadb_mysql (currently 117 subscribers) and https://programming.dev/c/mariadb_mysql (58 subscribers). 

At the same time, we are wondering how to take into account the usage of Gen AI in coding developer and DBA work. AI platforms are a black box – how will we know how much people are using GenAI to use MariaDB?