MariaDB + DuckDB: A New Playground for Analytics – A First Look at the New Storage Engine

MariaDB just announced it has learned to quack: the new DuckDB storage engine has joined the large family of storage engines in MariaDB Server.

The idea is very interesting: use MariaDB Server as usual, but create some tables using ENGINE=DuckDB and benefit from DuckDB’s columnar storage and vectorized execution for analytical queries.

In other words, we can keep our transactional workload in InnoDB, and use DuckDB tables for analytics… in the same MariaDB instance. Not a new concept, but a new and powerful implementation!

This is, of course, not something I would recommend for production today;

MariaDB Server 12.3, 11.8, 11.4, 10.11, 10.6 – May 2026’s releases: thank you for your contributions

On May… we have released an update of our 5 current LTS releases:

These new releases contain a large amount of external contributions. The number of contributors is constantly growing, which is great!

On behalf of the MariaDB Foundation and the entire MariaDB Team, let me thank you all!

If we refer to MariaDB Server 11.8, we have about 62 contributions from 35 external contributors.

MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions Nominees: Mark Callaghan

Interview with Mark Callaghan, nominated in the Technical Excellence category.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Mark Callaghan, recently nominated for the MariaDB Sea Lion Champions program in the “Technical Excellence” category. Mark is a respected figure in the database community, known for his in-depth performance analysis and contributions to the open-source dialogue.

The Interview

lefred: Mark, congratulations on your nomination as a MariaDB Sea Lion Champion. How do you feel about this recognition?

Mark Callaghan: I am always grateful for acknowledgment. But I’m a private person, so I’m not always comfortable standing out.

MariaDB Hidden Gem: Create Aggregate Function

Have you ever written a query where the GROUP BY was easy, but the aggregate was the problem?

You know how to group the rows.
You know what result you want for each group.
But none of the built-in aggregate functions really match your logic.

So you end up with a long expression using SUM(), CASE, IF(), GROUP_CONCAT(), JSON functions, or application-side code. It works, but it is not beautiful. And if you need the same logic in several places, it becomes even worse.

This is exactly the kind of problem MariaDB’s CREATE AGGREGATE FUNCTION solves.

Celebrating the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lions Champions Nominees

The MariaDB Foundation Sea Lions Champions recognize individuals and organizations that strengthen the MariaDB ecosystem through technical excellence, community leadership, open-source stewardship, ecosystem impact, and real-world adoption.

This first edition’s nominees reflect the diversity and strength of the MariaDB Community: developers, educators, advocates, companies, community organizers, and partners who help MariaDB grow as an open, collaborative, and industry-relevant database platform.

Each nomination highlights a different way to strengthen the database ecosystem and help MariaDB remain open, useful, and innovative.

Technical Excellence

The Technical Excellence category highlights people who contribute deep technical expertise, engineering quality, and innovation around MariaDB and the broader database ecosystem.

MariaDB Community Server Corrective Releases

If you are a Galera user, you are strongly recommended to upgrade ASAP!

MariaDB Community Server corrective releases are now available for the currently maintained long-term series. These releases address critical CVEs, and we strongly recommend that all users review the security advisories and upgrade as soon as possible.

These are Stable (GA) releases and are recommended for users running the corresponding MariaDB Server series.

MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS Released

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS, the latest Long Term Support release of MariaDB Server. The first GA of the 12.3 series is 12.3.2.

MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS includes the features and improvements introduced during the MariaDB 12.x development series and provides a stable release line for production environments requiring long-term maintenance.

Highlights

MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS includes improvements across several areas of the server, including binary logging, SQL compatibility, replication, optimizer behavior, security, GIS, JSON, and general server usability.

Important

In MariaDB 12.3, innodb_snapshot_isolation defaults to ON

As we wanted to be correct when using REPEATBLE READ isolation level, we changed the default of the InnoDB snapshot isolation.

ProxySQL joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor

We are very pleased to welcome ProxySQL as a Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.

ProxySQL is the leading proxy for MySQL and has recently focused on supporting more and more of MariaDB, both with the Proxy and with other open-source projects ProxySQL is stewarding, like dbdeployer and orchestrator.

I had the chance to interview René Cannaò, CEO of ProxySQL.

Why is it important for ProxySQL to sponsor an organization like the MariaDB Foundation?

ProxySQL was born within the MySQL ecosystem, and MariaDB has always been an important part of it.