I think you’ve come to expect that every collaboration with Intel leads to meaningful, well-executed projects that bring great value to the community. This time, we’re spreading our wings towards empowering enterprises to deploy AI solutions, and we’re excited to show how MariaDB Vector fits into the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA).
🤖 Open Platform for Enterprise AI
The Open Platform for Enterprise AI, or simply OPEA, is a new sandbox-level project within the LF AI & Data Foundation where Intel plays a pivotal role in its active development and once again it shows its strong commitment to open-source innovation.
…
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.
…
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.
…
Continue reading “Amazon’s AI-agents for MariaDB Contributions”
Right after the recent MariaDB Meetup in London, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Steve Shaw – founder and CEO of HammerDB, former Principal Engineer at Intel, and board member of the MariaDB Foundation. Steve delivered the keynote talk at the event and has a unique perspective on performance, open source, and the intersection between commercial and community-driven database development.
This blog post captures our conversation – a dialogue between two people passionate about open source and database performance. We talk about Steve’s transition from Intel to HammerDB, his relationship with MariaDB Corporation, the nuances of performance testing, and what lies ahead for the HammerDB and MariaDB communities.
…
Continue reading “Open Source Performance, Benchmarks and MariaDB: A Conversation with Steve Shaw”
We’re excited to welcome RAVATAR as our Silver Sponsor! A bold innovator in artificial intelligence, RAVATAR is defining the emerging Face of AI through high-quality interactive digital humans and real-time AI avatars.
By crafting AI that communicates with emotion, insight, and purpose, RAVATAR advances its mission to humanize technology, making tech feel like a conversation rather than a command.
Their support for open-source communities like ours speaks to a clear commitment to shared innovation, radical transparency, and AI that puts people first. This partnership resonates deeply with our own AI ambitions, especially the development of MariaDB Vector, which brings scalable vector search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities into the hands of developers worldwide.
…
Continue reading “RAVATAR becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation”
I suppose not all of my readers have a first hand (or even second hand) experience of the girls-night-in. So let me shed some light on this sacred ritual of tea, sympathy and soul-baring conversation that zigzags from the ridiculous to the profound and back again in under 30 seconds.
There a few eternal mysteries that always seem to come up –
Like:
“Why do I have nothing to wear when my wardrobe is clearly full of clothes?”
And:
“Why does cat food smell weirdly delicious?”
(Okay, I do know the answer to that one: stop crash-dieting already!
…
Continue reading “The Queen, the contributions and the wardrobe”
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.
…
Continue reading “MariaDB Vector and RAG at foss-north 2025”
We’re pleased to welcome Kinsta as a Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation. Kinsta, one of the leading managed WordPress hosting providers, powers thousands of websites globally with a platform built for speed, scalability, and security — and MariaDB plays a central role in that architecture.
Kinsta also holds the highest G2 score of any managed hosting provider or web hosting provider. In 2022, the company was listed under the “Top 100 Fastest Growing Products.” Kinsta offers 24/7 support 365 days a year – in five languages – from its team of expert engineers. With its new Application Hosting and Database Hosting services, plus hosting for WordPress that offers support for complex installations such as Bedrock, reverse-proxy configurations, and tools such as SSH and WP-CLI, its entire platform is built with developers in mind.
…
Continue reading “New Silver Sponsor: Kinsta Chooses MariaDB for Scalable, Open WordPress Hosting”