MariaDB 13.1 Feature in Focus: DENY / Negative Grants

MariaDB 13.1 Preview is full of nice things.

Some are immediately visible to developers, like the new JSON operators. Some are very useful to DBAs, such as configuration validation. And some are about making security and access control easier to manage.

Today, let’s look at one of those: DENY, also known as negative grants.

Yes, negative grants.

It sounds a bit strange the first time you hear it, but the idea is very simple:

Sometimes it is easier to say “you can access everything here, except this”.

Lowering the Barrier for MariaDB Plugin Development: Plugins in More Languages

MariaDB Server has long supported a flexible plugin architecture. Plugins allow developers to extend server functionality in areas such as data types, auditing, storage engines, information schema tables, and more.

Today, MariaDB Server plugins are typically developed in C or C++, like the server’s codebase. At least for a while

Even with the current plugin-writing approach, familiarity with MariaDB internals is beneficial because it enables you to do things you otherwise cannot. But it is not required.

A new development idea, MDEV-40189: Support plugins written in various languages, explores whether MariaDB Server could make plugin development accessible from additional programming languages.

MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions Nominees: Fariha Shaikh

The MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions program celebrates the people and organizations who help make the MariaDB ecosystem stronger, more open, and more useful for everyone.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Fariha, a recent nominee for the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champion program in the Technical Excellence category. Fariha’s journey into the world of databases and open-source contributions is both inspiring and a testament to the vibrant MariaDB community. We sat down with Fariha to discuss her path, her work, and what this nomination means to her.

The Interview

lefred: Fariha, congratulations on your nomination for the MariaDB Foundation Seal Lion Champion program in the Technical Excellence category!

MariaDB Privacy-First Stack: Nextcloud, Passbolt and MariaDB Server

I hear this sentence a lot: “We care about privacy.”

Good.

But then you look a bit closer.

Files are on some cloud platform. Nobody is completely sure which settings were changed two years ago. Passwords are in browsers, in chat messages, sometimes in a document with a name like credentials-final-v3. Backups? “The provider handles that.” Maybe. Where is the data exactly? “In Europe, normally.” Who has access? That’s when the room becomes quiet.

I don’t call that a privacy strategy.

I call that hoping nothing goes wrong.

MariaDB 13.1 Preview: This One Is Full of Community Goodies!

We just announced the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 13.1 series.

MariaDB 13.1 is a rolling release preview, and, as usual, this is the right moment to test what is coming, give feedback, and help us polish the next MariaDB Server release.

But this time, there is something really interesting.

And by “interesting”, I mean: wow!

MariaDB 13.1 Preview includes 32 MDEVs with new features and improvements. To put that in perspective:

ReleaseMDEVs
MariaDB Server 12.2 11
MariaDB Server 12.3 15
MariaDB Server 13.0 17
MariaDB Server 13.1 32

How to make Joro happy

That is almost twice MariaDB 13.0, more than twice MariaDB 12.3, and almost three times MariaDB 12.2.

MariaDB Server 10.6 Reaches End of Life on July 6th

MariaDB Server 10.6 has been with us for a long time. It was the last MariaDB LTS released under the previous release model, and it has served many users, distributions, applications, and production environments very well.

But every maintained series eventually reaches the end of its maintenance lifetime.

MariaDB Community Server 10.6 will reach End of Life on 6 July 2026.

After that date, the MariaDB Foundation will no longer provide maintenance releases for MariaDB Community Server 10.6. That means no more bug fixes, no more security fixes, and no more corrective releases for that branch.

MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions Nominees: Sylvain Arbaudie

Interview with Sylvain Arbaudie, nominated in the Technical Excellence category.

The MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions program celebrates the people and organizations who help make the MariaDB ecosystem stronger, more open, and more useful for everyone.

Let’s continue the series of interviews with nominees for the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions program.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sylvain Arbaudie, a nominee for our “Sea Lions Champions” program in the Technical Excellence category. With over a decade of experience in the MariaDB ecosystem, Sylvain offers valuable insights into the platform’s evolution, its role in the AI landscape, and the crucial function of the MariaDB Foundation.

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;