2016 in the MariaDB Foundation

We have been very busy in 2016 and early 2017 so this yearly report is long overdue, but we are glad we can report on so many positive things.

Good growth has been visible all over the MariaDB ecosystem, and the mariadb.org website had almost 1.9 million page views in 2016, a growth of 72% since 2015. We can conclude that 2016 was a successful year for MariaDB.

Active maintenance and active development

In 2016 there were 7 releases of the 5.5 series, 5 releases of the 10.0 series and 10 releases of the 10.1 series. …

MariaDB.org page views increased by 77%

It is over a year since the overhauled MariaDB.org was published. We immediately got a lot of positive feedback and now looking at the statistics a year later we are glad to report that the number of visits has grown by 28% and the amount of page views has grown a whopping 77% from 1,1 million to 1,9 million. That is a significant acceleration in growth when one considers that the growth of page views the previous year (from 2014 to 2015) was only 7%. Some of the growth can surely be attributed to a general trend of MariaDB getting more adoption, but in particular the growth of page views (77%) and the decrease of bounces (-37%) and the average session duration increase from 1 minute to 1½ minutes can be attributed to the redesign. …

Extended maintenance period for MariaDB 5.5

As the maintenance policy of the MariaDB Foundation states, we are committed to maintaining each release for 5 years. As MariaDB 5.5 was announced for General Availability in 2012, the five year mark will soon be passed. However, since MariaDB 5.5 is widely used in many major Linux distributions in production use at the moment, the Foundation has decided to extend the maintenance period for MariaDB 5.5 to the year 2020.

All Linux distributions currently including MariaDB 5.5 will thus continue to have security updates available for at least until 2020.

The MariaDB Foundation’s mission is to serve the greater public and we’ve decided that supporting MariaDB 5.5 for an extended period is a good use of the MariaDB Foundation’s staff time. …

New MariaDB Foundation staff member sponsored by Alibaba: Lixun Peng

The MariaDB Foundation is happy to announce that today a new staff member, Lixun Peng, has started working as a Senior Developer of MariaDB. Lixun’s work is sponsored by Alibaba, and he also holds the title of Staff Database Engineer at Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba is a China-based e-commerce company founded in 1999. It has grown to be one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world with a market value of over 200 billion euros. There are more than one hundred thousand mysqld instances in Alibaba Cloud RDS (Alibaba’s database cloud service). Through its history, Alibaba has used MySQL/MariaDB and has now also sponsored the MariaDB Foundation. …

MariaDB Server is a true open source project

The mission of the MariaDB Foundation is to ensure continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem. We facilitate the development of the MariaDB Server and the related connectors as listed on our GitHub account. Core to us is to enable and foster collaboration so that contributing is meaningful and produces results for everybody.

Here are some of the things we do to ensure true open source:

MariaDB Foundation financial report for 2015

The 2015 accounting for the MariaDB Foundation has been completed and the key figures are:

  • Total income: 272 827,95 USD
  • Total expenses: 276 684,73 USD
  • Net income after adjustments: 1 337,34 USD

Staff costs were about 240 000 USD. Travel costs were only about 3 000 USD. The remaining 35 000 USD is administration (accounting, finances, legal) and other expenses. As some of our staff cost is also administration (mostly the CEO) we can estimate that about 83 % (230k out of 276k) goes to software development related activities (including documentation and packaging), so we are quite efficient on how the funds are used. …

2015 in the MariaDB Foundation

The mariadb.org website had over one million page views in 2015, a growth of about 9% since 2014. Good growth has been visible all over the MariaDB ecosystem and we can conclude that 2015 was a successful year for MariaDB.

Increased adoption

MariaDB was included for the first time in an official Debian release (version 8.0 “Jessie”) and there has been strong adoption of MariaDB 10.0 in Linux distributions that already shipped 5.5. MariaDB is now available from all major Linux distributions including SUSE, RedHat, Debian and Ubuntu.

Adoption of MariaDB in other platforms also increased, and MariaDB is now available as a database option on, among others, Amazon RDS, 1&1Azure and Juju Charm Store (Ubuntu). …

New MariaDB.org with fresh looks and contents

Today we have published a long overdue facelift of the MariaDB.org website. You are looking at the result right now! Some of the highlights are:

  • New responsive design with the new logo and a blue theme
  • The old blog has been merged into the main MariaDB.org site
  • The supporters of the Foundation are much more visible thanks to the big banner in the footer
  • What the MariaDB Foundation is and what it does is now better presented
  • Policies related to MariaDB and instructions on how to contribute to the open source project have been updated
  • It is now easier for individuals to donate to the Foundation thanks to the PayPal and Flattr buttons.