Author: Kaj Arnö
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The database world grew up — notes from Percona Live Amsterdam
Last week I spent a few days in Amsterdam at Percona Live. It was the first Percona Live in Europe since before the pandemic, and you could feel it in the room: a slightly disbelieving happiness at simply being together again. Peter Zaitsev put it well when we sat down afterwards — nobody was quite sure what to expect, and it turned out to be a great event precisely because everyone had missed this.
I have been around since the […]
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MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions Nominees: Sumit Srivastava
Interview with Sumit Srivastava, nominated in the Adoption & Industry Impact category.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Sumit Srivastava, SVP Business Development & Products at Tayana, a Bangalore-based telecom software company. Sumit was nominated for championing MariaDB adoption in the telecommunications industry and its demonstration of open-source database delivering performance, scalability, and business impact in mission-critical systems. Like me, Sumit sits between technical and business — “the business people think I’m technical, and the technical people think I’m […]
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MariaDB Foundation at Oracle’s MySQL Contributor Summit: Ecosystems, Forks and Constructive Coexistence
Last week, Oracle invited MariaDB Foundation to give a presentation at Oracle’s MySQL Contributor Summit 2026. I had the opportunity to participate remotely and speak about MariaDB’s role within the broader MySQL ecosystem.
First of all, I would like to thank Heather VanCura, VP Community Engagement at Oracle, and Jason Wilcox, SVP Data Services at Oracle, for the invitation and for creating a space where these discussions could happen openly and constructively.
The presentation itself is available here on YouTube. […]
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Database Trends: What is changing in the database world (besides AI)
Earlier this month, I had a half-hour chat with Kellyn Gorman, a Database and AI Advocate and Engineer at Redgate. The UK software company is known for database DevOps and database management tools most databases – and since 2024 as the owner of DB-Engines popularity Ranking of database management systems.
The chat was an intellectual pleasure, to say the least. Kellyn is outstandingly well informed on databases, with a background starting in Oracle, spanning most databases as a DBA and […]
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Is MariaDB part of the MySQL ecosystem?
Why MariaDB is both its own database — and the natural continuation of MySQL
Because MariaDB is at the same time a completely independent database and a fundamentally compatible extension of MySQL, the MySQL user base is not dependent upon Oracle nor upon new forks of MySQL for their future. For pragmatical reasons – and those have always carried weight in the MySQL universe – MariaDB is part of the MySQL ecosystem.
Applications, teams, skills, investments, and use cases — all […]
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Reading the Room: What Europe’s MySQL Community Is Really Saying
FOSDEM was exciting from a MariaDB perspective for many reasons this year. For this blog, let me concentrate on one aspect: The discussions at what was called the “Summit for MySQL Community, Europe”, hosted by Percona on Monday 2 Feb 2026 at the Marriott Grand Place in central Brussels.
We got the answer key – the “Oracle examiner’s solution”
With many of my former MySQL AB colleagues leaving Oracle over the years, I certainly had a fairly good picture of […]
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MariaDB is the natural replacement for MySQL
MariaDB is the natural replacement for MySQL. Why? Because it is the organic continuation of the MySQL that conquered the Internet. MySQL 8.0 is a fork of that foundation, while MariaDB stayed on track. That said, the MySQL fork is soft: Compatibility remains remarkable and migration back to the mothership is smooth.
As the Chairman of the MariaDB Foundation, and someone having joined MySQL AB’s management team in 2001, that is my response to the article As Oracle loses interest […]
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Making MariaDB the Natural Successor to MySQL
At the MariaDB Foundation, clarity of purpose matters. In an ecosystem as foundational as open-source databases, confidence is built not through slogans, but through predictability, restraint, and long-term commitment.
As I reflect upon what we learned in 2025 and how we can serve the database community in 2026, one thought stands out: MariaDB is the natural successor to MySQL, as Oracle loses its interest in the development of what has been the default Open Source Relational DBMS.
The MariaDB Foundation […]