On Monday, I sent out an email to the staff of MariaDB Foundation. In the hope that my thinking is also applicable for someone else, here’s a slightly edited excerpt:
My email to our staff
For an unknown amount of time, we will live under exceptional circumstances. Yet, there will be life both during and after the Corona pandemic. With this email, I want to share my view on how Corona affects our organisation, on how we sustain life during Corona and on how we best prepare for life after Corona.
When facing adverse times, I fall back on thoughts and values I have read and contemplated.
Last Wednesday, I received an unexpected text: “Would you like to do some volunteering work? It involves speaking online to some kids for one hour about IT”. It was a classmate from high school.
MariaDB Foundation employees work remotely. Sure, we all meet together in one place a number of times a year so we don’t forget each other’s faces, but in 99% of our logged time, we are distributed around the globe. We are also not required to have a strict working schedule and this offers us the opportunity to say yes easily to these sort of events.
My favourite running track is full! Full of newbie runners, young and old. Mostly running alone, sometimes in pairs – but all following social distancing.
Social distancing can be coupled with emotional closeness. That’s at least what Sauli Niinistö propagates, the President of Finland. In line with these two phenomena – emotional closeness between isolated colleagues, and the boom of running as a source of energy during lockdown – we are launching the Solstice Run.
We want to inspire non-runners to run
As initiators, we want to inspire others to start running.
With many of us spending lots of time at home in front of our webcams, MariaDB Foundation’s YouTube channel is getting some love. After lurking quietly after registration, we’ve kickstarted it recently by uploading all presentations from the recent MariaDB Day, held in Brussels in February.
MariaDB Foundation’s CEO, Kaj Arnö, put together Hi from Kaj (the rhyming should help clarify confusion on how to pronounce his name) where he asks for feedback on which video topics you’d like to see us tackle.
For now we’re focusing on features already available in MariaDB, not features. Read more
Congratulations, MariaDB Corporation, on releasing SkySQL, a DBaaS offering for MariaDB Server! This is a big step for MariaDB Corporation, and we in the MariaDB Foundation hope it’s going to be a success for you and for MariaDB Server.
We welcome SkySQL as a further contributor to the adoption of MariaDB Server, and look forward to it driving in new categories of users.
To find out more, check out https://mariadb.com/skysql/.
MariaDB deployments hold vast amounts of sensitive data such as intellectual property, state secrets, healthcare and financial records. HIPAA, GDPR and other government regulations require even more stringent protections and disclosures. Achieving post-compromise protection is seen as a necessary new tool available to DevOps teams.
At the first MariaDB Day in Brussels on February 2nd, Virgil Security’s CTO and co-founder Dmitry Dain presented a MariaDB demo based on the Virgil PureKit security framework that can protect stored passwords, PII and any other sensitive data even if the database had been breached – making it worthless to the attacker in the face of offline attacks (read more about security benefits in this blog post). Read more
Time to renew downloads.mariadb.org! We are embarking on a long project. A large part of our user base mainly interacts with us through downloading new versions. Renewing MariaDB Downloads is the biggest-impact project of all of 2020, for that part of our user base.
Projects like this often get launched when external and internal impulses coincide. Our users have asked for a more consistent, simpler user experience. Advanced users would like a programmatic interface (a.k.a. REST API) for part of the functionality. And the current codebase needs refactoring attention, as it has served past its best-before date.
The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 10.5.2, the second beta release in the MariaDB 10.5 development series.
See the release notes and changelogs for details.
Release Notes Changelog What is MariaDB 10.5?
MariaDB APT and YUM Repository Configuration Generator
Contributors to MariaDB 10.5.2
Aleksey Midenkov (MariaDB Corporation)
Alexander Barkov (MariaDB Corporation)
Alexander E. Patrakov
Alexey Botchkov (MariaDB Corporation)
Alexey Bychko
Andrei Elkin (MariaDB Corporation)
Andy Fiddaman (OmniOS CE)
Anel Husakovic (MariaDB Foundation)
Ben Boeckel (Kitware)
Daniel Bartholomew (MariaDB Corporation)
Daniel Black (IBM)
Daniele Sciascia (Codership)
Daniel Solo
Eugene Kosov (MariaDB Corporation)
Ian Gilfillan (MariaDB Foundation)
Igor Babaev (MariaDB Corporation)
Jan Lindström (MariaDB Corporation)
Jon Olav Hauglid (Oracle)
Julius Goryavsky (MariaDB Corporation)
Kentoku Shiba
Mario Karuza (Codership)
Marko Mäkelä (MariaDB Corporation)
Michael Widenius (MariaDB Corporation and MariaDB Foundation)
Namrata Bhave (IBM)
Oleksandr Byelkin (MariaDB Corporation)
Otto Kekäläinen
Petr Vaněk
Rahul Anand
Rasmus Johansson (MariaDB Corporation)
Roman Nozdrin (MariaDB Corporation)
Seppo Jaakola (Codership)
Sergei Golubchik (MariaDB Corporation)
Sergei Petrunia (MariaDB Corporation)
Sergey Vojtovich (MariaDB Foundation)
Stepan Patryshev (MariaDB Corporation)
Sujatha Sivakumar (MariaDB Corporation)
Thirunarayanan Balathandayuthapani (MariaDB Corporation)
Varun Gupta (MariaDB Corporation)
Vicențiu Ciorbaru (MariaDB Foundation)
Vladislav Vaintroub (MariaDB Corporation)
Vlad Lesin
41 Contributors
Thanks, and enjoy MariaDB! Read more