MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions Nominees: Fariha Shaikh

The MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions program celebrates the people and organizations who help make the MariaDB ecosystem stronger, more open, and more useful for everyone.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Fariha, a recent nominee for the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champion program in the Technical Excellence category. Fariha’s journey into the world of databases and open-source contributions is both inspiring and a testament to the vibrant MariaDB community. We sat down with Fariha to discuss her path, her work, and what this nomination means to her.

The Interview

lefred: Fariha, congratulations on your nomination for the MariaDB Foundation Seal Lion Champion program in the Technical Excellence category!

MariaDB Privacy-First Stack: Nextcloud, Passbolt and MariaDB Server

I hear this sentence a lot: “We care about privacy.”

Good.

But then you look a bit closer.

Files are on some cloud platform. Nobody is completely sure which settings were changed two years ago. Passwords are in browsers, in chat messages, sometimes in a document with a name like credentials-final-v3. Backups? “The provider handles that.” Maybe. Where is the data exactly? “In Europe, normally.” Who has access? That’s when the room becomes quiet.

I don’t call that a privacy strategy.

I call that hoping nothing goes wrong.

Passbolt renews its support for MariaDB Foundation

MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce that Passbolt has renewed its Silver sponsorship for another year, continuing its long-term support for the MariaDB open-source ecosystem.

Passbolt is an open-source password manager designed for teams, with a strong focus on security, privacy, and user control. Its continued support reflects a shared commitment to building practical, trustworthy open-source infrastructure that organizations can deploy and operate with confidence.

Building on the Privacy-First Stack

During the first year of collaboration, Passbolt became part of the Privacy-First Solution Stack alongside Nextcloud and MariaDB Server.

Aqtra Joins MariaDB Foundation as a Gold Sponsor

MariaDB Foundation is pleased to welcome Aqtra Platform as a new Gold Sponsor.

Aqtra is a Development Infrastructure Layer (DIL) platform for building ERP solutions, business applications, internal and external portals, and workflows that connect multiple systems. The platform provides the underlying architecture, governance, integration, and runtime capabilities required to develop and operate business applications at scale, helping organisations automate complex processes without building and maintaining every application from scratch.

As part of the next stage of its platform evolution, Aqtra has selected MariaDB Server as the strategic database foundation for its next-generation architecture.

MariaDB 13.1 Preview: This One Is Full of Community Goodies!

We just announced the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 13.1 series.

MariaDB 13.1 is a rolling release preview, and, as usual, this is the right moment to test what is coming, give feedback, and help us polish the next MariaDB Server release.

But this time, there is something really interesting.

And by “interesting”, I mean: wow!

MariaDB 13.1 Preview includes 32 MDEVs with new features and improvements. To put that in perspective:

ReleaseMDEVs
MariaDB Server 12.2 11
MariaDB Server 12.3 15
MariaDB Server 13.0 17
MariaDB Server 13.1 32

How to make Joro happy

That is almost twice MariaDB 13.0, more than twice MariaDB 12.3, and almost three times MariaDB 12.2.

MariaDB 13.1 preview available

We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 13.1 series. MariaDB 13.1 will be a rolling release.

MariaDB 13.1 introduces a lot of new features. Many of them were implemented by our awesome community contributors. See the complete list below:

  • DENY clause for access control a.k.a. “negative grants” (MDEV-14443)
  • Auto-adding new partitions for PARTITION BY RANGE (MDEV-15621)
  • Locking full table scan fails to use table-level locking (MDEV-24813)
  • The default utf8 character set is now utf8mb4 (MDEV-30041)
  • NEW and OLD in a trigger can be used as row variables (MDEV-34723)
  • ADAPTIVE_HASH_INDEX = { YES | NO | DEFAULT } can specify per InnoDB table whether to use AHI (MDEV-37070)
  • XMLISVALID() schema validation function (MDEV-37262)
  • Adaptive hash index statistics is shown in ANALYZE FORMAT=JSON (MDEV-38305)
  • Optimizer Context Recorder to record the optimizer data and then analyze query optimization on another server instance (MDEV-38701)
  • innodb_tablespace_size_warning_threshold and innodb_tablespace_size_warning_pct variables to get a warning when InnoDB tablespace is getting close to full (before it’s 100% full and the service is disrupted) (MDEV-38936)
  • Local routine variables usable in PREPARE/EXECUTE/DEALLOCATE and OPEN …

Simple tool to build MariaDB commits for performance-change analysis

Tracking down changes in database performance is one of the hardest parts of engineering, especially when the change is buried somewhere in a long commit history.

To make this work easier and more repeatable, I put together a small but important tool:

MariaDBCommitBuilder.sh

This script does one thing well:

Given a commit hash, it checks out that commit, builds it cleanly, and packages it in a deterministic way so the Test Automation Framework (TAF) can run consistent performance tests.

Why this matters

  • When you are bisecting or doing a manual binary search across hundreds of commits, you need reproducible builds.

MariaDB Vector in Laravel: insights on choosing an embedding model

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.