Author Archives: Robert Silén
In our mission to grow MariaDB adoption, we’re always eager to spotlight the journeys of real-world users – especially those who’ve made thoughtful, strategic choices. Thanks to long-time MariaDB consultant and community champion Oli Sennhauser, we got a chance to sit down with one of his clients: Swiss eCommerce provider Glarotech of the PepperShop platform, and their founder Roland Brühwiler.
When Swiss eCommerce platform provider Glarotech started over 20 years ago, it was a small university project with three people. Today, it has grown to 30 employees and thousands of eCommerce clients – but many of their early choices still echo through their technology stack.
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Last week we announced the winners of the MariaDB AI RAG hackathon that we organized together with the Helsinki Python meetup group. Now is time to go for a deep dive into the innovation track winner. Dymtro Abramov put together an end to end RAG application for making technical meetup videos searchable with semantic relevance (based on their caption texts). We were impressed by the idea and the implementation that is definitely beyond just a proof of concept for AI RAG with MariaDB Vector.
Dmytro, tell us about yourself and why you decided to join the Hackathon?
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We recently announced the winners of the MariaDB AI RAG hackathon that we organized together with the Helsinki Python meetup group. Let’s deep dive into the integration track winner. David Ramos chose to contribute a MariaDB integration for MCP Server. MariaDB plc was impressed by the results and has picked it up for further development with more features.
David, tell us about yourself and why you decided to join the Hackathon?
I am an aspiring Data Scientist from Colombia. I studied Physics in college, but by the time I graduated, I realized what I enjoyed the most was working with data and programming, so I decided to make the shift to Data Science.
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The Helsinki Python meetup on Tuesday 27th May was hosted by MariaDB Foundation with nearly 100 participants of the 2600+ members of the Helsinki python meetup community.
In addition to being a successful opportunity to mingle and learn python together, we finally got to announce the winners of the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon! (winners posing in the feature photo of the blog)
Presentations: AI and MariaDB
We welcomed participants of the meetup with a brief introduction to what MariaDB is as a software, and the sponsoring parties: MariaDB Foundation, Open Ocean Capital and verkkokauppa.com.
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Continue reading “Helsinki Python meetup with AI RAG and MariaDB Foundation”
On Monday we had our final submission day for the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon. We got several high quality replies in both tracks: integration and innovation.
The quality was so high that we are keen to replicate this hackathon in other locations and are currently looking for cooperation partners. We are truly grateful to the Helsinki Python meetup group without which this would not have been possible. They have a great community, organise excellent events, and played a key role in making the hackathon happen.
We are now reviewing the submissions together with the Helsinki Python meetup group.
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Continue reading “Impressive Submissions at the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon”
We at MariaDB Foundation are thrilled to see Amazon at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to open source contributions — with MariaDB as their pilot.
At the May 6th MariaDB meetup in Bremen, Bardia Hassanzadeh, PhD, presented the Upstream Pilot tool: an AI-based assistant designed to help developers identify, analyze, and resolve open issues in MariaDB more effectively.
This initiative is the most promising we’ve seen for improving the open source contribution process. Bardia and Hugo Wen of Amazon gave us a preview last week and we were already very impressed.
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Continue reading “Amazon’s AI-agents for MariaDB Contributions”
I had the delight of being accepted to talk about “Making AI transparent with RAG on your own data” at foss-north 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden. On April 14th at Chalmers University, I got to share with a full room on how AI RAG is done with MariaDB Vector, kicking off with a use case about scaling Wikipedia editing with GenAI.
Improving Wikipedia with RAG
I presented a use case example from my experience of editing Wikipedia at scale with GenAI for non-profit Projekt Fredrika.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Vector and RAG at foss-north 2025”
We had the pleasure on Friday to take individual calls with everybody who submitted to the ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG hackathon.
The ideation phase deadline passed last week, and we are happy to share that we received several promising submissions for both the innovation track and the integration track. Innovation involves applications using MariaDB Vector, like RAG, and integration being enabling MariaDB Vector in an existing framework.
Participants range from individual contributors to even a corporate team. Some already have some experience with AI, and some are newcomers to RAG.
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