On yearly goals, plc woes and habits at MariaDB Foundation

When setting long-term goals, striking the right balance is difficult: Not too generic (fluffy), not too specific (micromanagement). Not too few (lack of challenges), not too many (overwhelming). Consistently focusing on core values, while adapting to changes in the environment.

MariaDB Foundation’s internal goal setting process for 2023 seems to be working out well – and some lessons learned may be of interest even to our community.

The most important lesson learned is about our half-year review.

Adverse conditions when planning 2023

We set our 2023 yearly goals in December, with an emphasis on the first half of the year.

The value of sponsoring MariaDB Foundation

Why does Intel sponsor the MariaDB Foundation? I had the opportunity to interview Steve Shaw, Principal Engineer at Intel and a Board Member at MariaDB Foundation.

I strongly urge you to look at the 09:34 long video on YouTube – Steve is well articulated and a pleasure to listen to. Still, here is a glimpse of what he goes into:

  1. MariaDB Server is incredibly popular software. Just the Docker image alone has had more than a billion downloads. The majority of MariaDB installations run on Intel servers and developers coding on Intel laptops and desktops.

Coming to a language near you!

In a movie theater near you, expect to soon see an explanation of MariaDB Server and MariaDB Foundation in your own language! That is, providing you speak one of the good dozen of languages we have frequently encountered in the MariaDB Server ecosystem.

English is a least common denominator

Like a majority of the MariaDB Server users, most of the developers behind MariaDB Server are non-native English speakers. We use Bad English as our lingua franca. Our pronunciation may be bearable to OK, but as with most techies, our understanding of written and spoken English is OK to good.

Multi-tenancy through catalogs in MariaDB Server

Let’s say you are a Cloud Service Provider, with many customers – each having many MariaDB Server users and databases. What if several such customers could share a single instance of MariaDB Server? That’s what we call the catalog feature, a feature that – if implemented – could potentially save lots of resources (and thus costs!) in a number of high-end use cases.

How the idea was born

At CloudFest 2023 near Frankfurt in March, we had in-depth meetings with a number of heavy MariaDB Server users – ones that one best would describe as Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

CloudFest Reflections by mariadb.org

CloudFest in Germany, what an event! Thousands of representatives of cloud service providers and the surrounding ecosystem. Although MariaDB Server seems to be the database of choice in this realm, 2023 was the first year when we were more extensively present for CloudFest.

Check out our 11:19 long video with Monty’s and my reflections!

Chat with our founder Monty, Michael Widenius

Related posts:

Creating the MariaDB Health Check plugin for WordPress

ChatGPT, OpenAI and MariaDB Foundation

When everybody and their grandmother are talking about ChatGPT, you know something is happening – something with significance outside the usual IT bubble. As the first in a series of blog entries, let me reflect upon what AI means for users of MariaDB Server – or, at least, what implications we at the MariaDB Foundation can see at this point in time.

The AI revolution is inevitable …

Pundits say that lawyers or programmers won’t be replaced by AI – but they will be replaced by lawyers or programmers that use AI. I would agree.

FOSDEM 2023: MariaDB Reflections

Finally, a face to face FOSDEM! The encounters invigorated day-to-day work for all of MariaDB Foundation, even those of us not present in Brussels.

Withdrawal symptoms

With three years since last time, it felt like it was about time to see the familiar FOSDEM faces live again. Finally, last weekend gave us a chance to do what one had come to take for granted – meet in packed devrooms, hear the latest, chat in corridors, exchange thoughts and make plans at Brussels cafés and restaurants.

Back with MySQL

The MariaDB, MySQL and Friends room was back together in one room, having been separated virtually.

MariaDB 11.0 – new optimizer, new major version series

With MariaDB 10.0.0 having been released over ten years ago (12 Nov 2012), you may ask yourself when there will be MariaDB 11.0.0. If so, I can answer you: Today.

You can now download MariaDB Server 11.0 Alpha preview from our dedicated download page and check out the release notes.

Time has passed …

Of course, we have a better reason for going with a new first number in a release other than ten years having passed. Significant new features. Significant incompatibilities with earlier versions.