Arjen’s Last Post

Tonight marks the conclusion of my brief period at the MariaDB Foundation.

The MDBF team is a wonderful diverse and talented group of people, and it has been my absolute honour and pleasure to work with each and every one of them.  It was great to meet almost everybody (and some of your families!) at our recent MDBF staff meeting in Helsinki, and also to see you working on things together. You rock!  I have no doubt that each of you will continue to grow and thrive in your individual field.

To everyone in the MariaDB Community, it has also been a great pleasure meeting, talking and working with you.  …

MariaDB Foundation at Percona Live Europe 2018

From 5 to 7 November 2018 will be my first conference visit since taking up my new position.  The sub-title of the conference in Frankfurt is “Open Source Database Conference”, which is great and quite accurate, as there are a lot of different database systems represented.  The name is not new though…. Georg Richter, Zak Greant and I started a conference by that name well over a decade ago.

The inaugural edition of what we then called OpenDBcon in 2005 saw, among others, Gregory Burd (BerkelyDB, Sleepycat), Josh Berkus, Gavin Sherry and Peter Eisentraut (PostgreSQL), Fred Toussi (HSQLDB), Dan Debrunner (Derby), D.Richard Hipp from SQLite, people from Firebird, many people from MySQL AB and the MySQL Community, and special guest newcomer Ingres which was about to get open sourced (Feb 2006). …

My first week, Looking Forward

First of all, thank you for your warm words of welcome – coming from so many people across different media, I think this is a very positive sign for working with the organisations and individuals within the MariaDB community.

Regardless of the situation, a change like this, or actually the person that comes in, is often described as a “new broom”.  So I’m a new broom.  This can provide a fresh start throughout, with an opportunity to clean up some stuff that is outdated, improve a few things, and execute new initiatives.

In my first week as CEO I’ve been talking with all our staff and of course reading  up on many things.  …

Hello World from the new MariaDB Foundation CEO: Arjen Lentz

It’s both my pleasure and honour to write this post.  Quite a few of you will know (of) me, but since that’s not necessarily the case I’ll try and make this a quick intro, as well as laying out some aspects of my thoughts and plans for the near future.

Who is Arjen?

A long time ago now, I was employee#25 at MySQL AB.  During that period (2001-2007) I worked on the MySQL reference manual and built the docs team, spoke at many conferences, user groups and events, built the global community relations team and its activities, was program chair for the 2005 and 2006 MySQL Users’ Conference, taught training courses, and represented the company in Australia. …