Author: Kaj Arnö
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This Month in MariaDB Foundation: August 2025
August may have been a holiday month for many, but the MariaDB community certainly didn’t take a break. From Amsterdam to Bengaluru, from deep technical dives to festive dinners, August brought us fresh insights, new collaborations, and plenty of reasons to be excited about the road ahead.
Community Interaction at Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Amsterdam
MariaDB Foundation proudly joined the Open Source Summit in Amsterdam, hosted by the Linux Foundation (LF OSS). Alongside me, Vlad Radu represented the […]
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MariaDB 11.8 LTS Released
Now is a good time to upgrade to the freshest MariaDB Server. MariaDB 11.8 is the yearly long term support release for 2025. It’s the first LTS with support for MariaDB Vector, and it includes a number of other updates based on user requests. You can seamlessly upgrade to MariaDB 11.8 from MariaDB 11.4 (the previous LTS) or any older release, back to MariaDB Server 10.0 or earlier, including most versions of MySQL Server.
MariaDB 11.8 LTS includes everything added […]
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Helsinki Python Hackathon – a role model for future MariaDB hackathons!
One of the most fun and rewarding activities the past two-three months has been working with the participants in the Helsinki Python hackathon on MariaDB Vector. Robert already blogged about the outcome and the award winners. Let me reflect a bit more on the entire process, as it has inspired us to do more of the same: Scaling out from Finland to other hackathons.
The goal: MariaDB Vector contributions
Our goal was to solicit contributions related to MariaDB Vector, but […]
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Releasing MariaDB for Universities: Lecture Materials for a New Generation
We have long had a vision: that learning relational databases with MariaDB should be accessible to everyone — students, educators, and self-learners alike. Today, MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB plc together take a major step forward in realizing that vision.
A Shared Effort for Open Education
MariaDB plc has generously released substantial professional training materials for academic and other non-commercial usage under an open source license. These materials are now publicly available on our GitHub repository at https://github.com/MariaDB/mariadb-for-universities/, and also accessible […]
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Open Source Performance, Benchmarks and MariaDB: A Conversation with Steve Shaw
Right after the recent MariaDB Meetup in London, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Steve Shaw – founder and CEO of HammerDB, former Principal Engineer at Intel, and board member of the MariaDB Foundation. Steve delivered the keynote talk at the event and has a unique perspective on performance, open source, and the intersection between commercial and community-driven database development.
This blog post captures our conversation – a dialogue between two people passionate about open source and database […]
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This month in MariaDB Foundation: Mar 2025
March was a busy month in the world of MariaDB!
Let’s explore the progress through the lens of the Six Goals for 2025, introduced in January.
Board Meeting 1/2025: New Executive Chairman, new CEO
But before we dive into that, let me briefly highlight developments from the two most recent Board Meetings. In the Report from the Board blog post about the late February meeting, I already noted a key organisational change:
Let me once more congratulate Anna, and encourage […]
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Tell us how to DROP USER!
Shortly, we will start coding a task, for which we would appreciate your input: How would you like to DROP USER?
Why do we ask?
DROP user (originating in MySQL in 2004) always used to just drop the account from the privilege tables, but left all existing connections active. You can argue that this was questionable in 2004, but it’s really unexpected and confusing in 2025, with MariaDB being ubiquitous as it is.
So now we’re considering changing it.
But […]
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Why contribute? Scratch your own itch!
Scratch you own itch, and help others while at it!
Why do people contribute to Open Source projects?
The question is as old as Open Source and its predecessor Free Software: Why do people contribute? We re-asked the oldie-but-goodie, and got results that confirm the old adage about scratching your own itch.
Fixing work or personal needs
The most popular answer? Fixing work or personal needs. It got 44 %, nearly half the votes. You simply need to get the […]