Releasing MariaDB for Universities: Lecture Materials for a New Generation

We have long had a vision: that learning relational databases with MariaDB should be accessible to everyone — students, educators, and self-learners alike. Today, MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB plc together take a major step forward in realizing that vision.

A Shared Effort for Open Education

MariaDB plc has generously released substantial professional training materials for academic and other non-commercial usage under an open source license. These materials are now publicly available on our GitHub repository at https://github.com/MariaDB/mariadb-for-universities/, and also accessible in a reader-friendly format at https://uni.mariadb.org

The materials are structured to guide users from beginner to intermediate levels, and are intended for incorporation into university courses or for self-paced study.

New Silver Sponsor: Senticore Technologies Chooses MariaDB for High-Performance Engineering and AI Applications

We welcome Senticore Technologies as a Silver Sponsor. Senticore, a leader in engineering and manufacturing applications, focuses on cutting-edge AI solutions, particularly for the aerospace and defense sectors, and powers critical systems worldwide. Senticore addresses these sectors’ concerns with locally deployed LLMs. Their platform integrates PDFs related to manufacturing, maintenance, and inspections processes into the digital thread. MariaDB supports their data-intensive workloads, crucial for high performance, reliability, and security, and its Vector capabilities are particularly important to Senticore’s AI development, enabling efficient storage and retrieval of LLM vector embeddings.

Senticore Technologies is renowned for pushing innovation in complex technical domains.

MariaDB Vector is available on OPEA

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.

Impressive Submissions at the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon

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.

Amazon’s AI-agents for MariaDB Contributions

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.

Open Source Performance, Benchmarks and MariaDB: A Conversation with Steve Shaw

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.

RAVATAR becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation

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.

The Queen, the contributions and the wardrobe

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!