MariaDB Plugins Beyond C++: What the Community Told Us

A few weeks ago, we asked a simple question:

Which language would you use to write MariaDB plugins?

The question related to MDEV-40189 (Support plugins written in various languages), an idea we introduced earlier this summer to lower the barrier to MariaDB plugin development by supporting languages other than C and C++.

The poll is now closed, and 2,090 people voted.

And the results are interesting.

Python and Rust lead, but there is no single winner

Python takes first place with 21%, closely followed by Rust with 19%.

MariaDB Connector/C Compatibility: An Update on CONC-821

As a DBA, there are some surprises I enjoy. Discovering a useful feature is one of them. Discovering that an application behaves differently after a maintenance update is considerably further down the list.

Maintenance updates should provide security and bug fixes while also helping people keep their applications running smoothly. Updates should not change behavior, especially not during maintenance releases. Should that happen for some reason, users and maintainers need a clear explanation and a practical way forward.

That’s not exactly what happened recently, causing an issue CONC-821 in MariaDB Connector/C.

Spoiler alert: The behaviour that MariaDB Connector/C changed was undocumented and implicit.

MariaDB at Percona Live Amsterdam 2026: Ecosystem, Plugins, Security, and Community

Percona Live returns to Europe on September 9–11, 2026, and MariaDB will be there!

The open source database community will gather at the Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre for three days of technical sessions, discussions and, probably just as importantly, conversations between the people building and running open source databases every day.

MariaDB will have a strong presence this year, with sessions from MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB engineers covering server extensibility, protocol security and the ecosystem surrounding MariaDB Server.

The MariaDB story at Percona Live goes beyond our own sessions: other members of the database community will share their experiences running MariaDB.

MariaDB Server 12.3, 11.8, 11.4 and 10.11 – Q3 2026 Maintenance Releases, and Goodbye 10.6

MariaDB Server maintenance releases are here!

On August 24, we released updates for our four currently maintained Long Term Support series:

  • MariaDB 12.3.3
  • MariaDB 11.8.9
  • MariaDB 11.4.13
  • MariaDB 10.11.19

As usual, these maintenance releases include bug fixes, stability improvements, and ongoing work across MariaDB Server.

You can find the complete release notes and changelogs for each version:

MariaDB 12.3.3

MariaDB 11.8.9

MariaDB 11.4.13

MariaDB 10.11.19

If you are running one of these MariaDB Server versions, we recommend reviewing the changelog and planning your upgrade.

MariaDB 13.1 Feature in Focus: JSON Operators and JSON_TABLE Improvements

JSON support in MariaDB has improved significantly over the years.

We have functions to create JSON documents, extract values, modify objects, inspect arrays, compare documents, and even transform JSON into relational rows using JSON_TABLE().

But sometimes, a very small piece of syntax can make a surprisingly large difference.

With MariaDB 13.1, we can finally write:

document->’$.customer.name’

and:

document->>’$.customer.name’

Yes, the JSON arrow operators have arrived in MariaDB!!

And MariaDB 13.1 also improves JSON_TABLE() with support for formatted JSON columns, allowing complete JSON objects and arrays to be returned without converting them into scalar SQL values.

From a Production Problem to MariaDB: Headout’s Open-Source Contribution Journey

When we talk about open source contributions, we often focus immediately on the code.

How many lines were changed?
What feature was added?
What do the benchmarks show?

But sometimes, the most interesting part is not the feature itself. It is the journey that transforms a production problem inside one company into an improvement available to an entire community.

This is exactly what happened with Headout, Arcadiy Ivanov (Karellen, Inc), and MariaDB Server.

The technical result is support for BLOB values in in-memory internal temporary tables.

Adobe Commerce Chooses MariaDB as Its Default Database Platform

Sometimes a change happens progressively, one compatibility matrix at a time, until somebody finally writes down what has already become obvious.

This time, Adobe wrote it down.

In its database compatibility guidance for Adobe Commerce, Adobe now describes MariaDB as the default and recommended database platform going forward.

This is the future direction of Adobe Commerce, and, I must admit, this is very nice to read.

Magento, Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce

Before going further, it is useful to clarify the names, because Magento and Adobe Commerce are often used interchangeably, even though they do not refer to exactly the same product.

Say the Name: MariaDB, MySQL, and the Ecosystem We Share

Names are important.

They help us identify people, projects, products, pets, database servers, and occasionally the correct bug tracker.

This may sound obvious, but the database world has spent more than fifteen years proving that it is not.

MySQL and MariaDB share a substantial amount of history, syntax, tooling, knowledge, applications, and community. They also have similar command names, compatible protocols, familiar configuration variables, and many users who simply say “MySQL” when they actually mean:

Some database server that speaks the MySQL protocol and probably has an executable named mysqld.

And most of the time, everybody understands.