Author Archives: Robert Silén
The MariaDB Adoption Index is up 126% in a year. More people are downloading MariaDB, more people are contributing to it, and more projects are building on it than at any point since we started measuring.
At the same time, the numbers show something else: the way people acquire and discover MariaDB is changing. Some of our older metrics are falling – not because MariaDB is, but because the channels they measure are.
The index combines 24 metrics – downloads, contributors, community, social – into one monthly number, baseline January 2024. Background in the original post.
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We want to know how you’re really using MariaDB — and databases in general. Not the marketing version or the one-off case study. The real story: what you’re building, how you are using it, what’s working, and what’s frustrating.
Last year we ran the first State of MariaDB survey. 275 of you took part, and the results became a public report linked from mariadb.org/survey. Now we’re back with the 2026 edition — the second annual survey — fresh questions, tailored to five different roles, open to non-MariaDB users too, and built to help MariaDB grow.
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laravel-mariadb-vector is an open-source project by Erik Ros, bringing MariaDB’s native vector search to Laravel’s Eloquent ORM. In his guest post, Erik shares how it works, and his insights about picking an embedding model.
I maintain laravel-mariadb-vector, a small open source package that brings MariaDB’s native vector search to Laravel’s Eloquent ORM. It’s my first open source project, it has over 100 installs, no marketing budget, and it exists because I needed it.
This post is a quick introduction and an experiment with 2,942 job titles in English and Dutch that shows why the embedding model you pick and how you use it matters far more than you might expect.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Vector in Laravel: insights on choosing an embedding model”
MariaDB is now clearly listed as the recommended database in Drupal’s official documentation. Following community discussion on Drupal.org, the Database server requirements now lists MariaDB first, and identifies it as the recommended database for Drupal 10, 11, and 12. Drupal is a major open source content management system—a flexible platform used by a substantial share of websites globally.
We’re glad to see this. Recognition matters because MariaDB is often used but documented as MySQL, going unnoticed under the hood—and when it goes unnamed, the work behind it loses visibility, a point Anna Widenius made in “I Am Not Building Cadillacs Anymore“, on how Henry Ford was long mistaken for the company that took his designs and became Cadillac.
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In October 2025, we launched the first State of MariaDB Survey to learn how the community really uses MariaDB. Today, we’re excited to share the results.
Why we did this
We wanted to move beyond assumptions and get real data from the people who work with MariaDB every day—developers, DBAs, architects, consultants, and everyone in between. The goal was simple: understand how MariaDB is actually being used so we can make it better.
What we learned
The survey covered seven areas: background and experience, organizational use, use cases, tech stacks, deployment practices, challenges, and community engagement.
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Continue reading “State of MariaDB 2025: The Results Are In”
We recently announced the winners of the MariaDB Python Hackathon. We sat down with the Innovation track second place winners to learn more about the team and their submission.
Sunny Kumar, Abhijeet Dhanotiya, Anuj Gupta, Tushan Kumar Sinha, and Anand Vyas developed Metadata-Hub, a multimodal semantic search application using MariaDB Vector and OpenAI’s CLIP model. They were interviewed by Robert Silén, Community Advocate and Kaj Arnö, Executive Chairman of MariaDB Foundation. For the recorded interview, watch it on Youtube, or read the interview below.
Before we start, a short explanation:
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We recently announced the winners of the MariaDB Python Hackathon. We sat down with the Innovation track first place winners to learn more about the team and their submission.
Aakanksha Singh and Mihir Phalke developed an Adaptive Query Optimizer for MariaDB Vector, addressing performance challenges in vector similarity search operations. They were interviewed by Robert Silén, Community Advocate and Kaj Arnö, Executive Chairman of MariaDB Foundation. For the recorded interview, watch it on Youtube, or read the interview below.
Introducing Mihir and Aakanksha
Mihir: My name is Mihir Phalke and alongside me is Aakanksha Singh.
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We recently announced the winners of the MariaDB Hackathon at the BangPypers meetup in Bengaluru. We are now interviewing the winner submissions, continuing with the Integration track second place winner.
We sat down with Ria Kulkarni and Revanth Sreeram Ambati who developed a Dagster integration for MariaDB, bringing modern data orchestration capabilities to the MariaDB ecosystem. They were interviewed by Robert Silén, Community Advocate and Kaj Arnö, Executive Chairman of MariaDB Foundation.
For the recorded interview, watch it on Youtube, or read the summary below.
First, let us repeat a short introduction on the topic of data orchestration that we also shared in the interview with the Airflow Integration track winner.
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Continue reading “Dagster integration for MariaDB – 2nd place in MariaDB BangPypers Hackathon 2025”