Introduction
Over the past weeks, questions around Galera, high availability, and continuity have generated understandable concern within parts of the MariaDB community.
Clarity matters in moments like this.That is also why this response was unfortunately not immediate. It was important to understand the full picture and ensure that what we communicate reflects the actual state of responsibilities and decisions.
This post explains where things stand today, what has changed, and how the MariaDB Foundation views its role going forward. Directly. Transparently. With responsibility.
Galera and the community: acknowledging the reality
High availability has always mattered.
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I wanted to share with you all some statistics on the incoming community contributions for the MariaDB server in the last year or so. And some of my thoughts looking at the data.
I’ve been quietly working on scripting some of my daily routines using the github CLI and the Jira REST API. Thanks to a question by Anna, the visionary MariaDB Foundation CEO, I’ve also created some scripts to fetch and summarize statistics on the incoming community contributions pull requests.
A picture’s worth a thousand words. So here we go:
This depicts the community pull requests opened or closed each month (the top graph).
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Continue reading “The Rising Tide of Community Contributions to MariaDB Server”
Why MariaDB is both its own database — and the natural continuation of MySQL
Because MariaDB is at the same time a completely independent database and a fundamentally compatible extension of MySQL, the MySQL user base is not dependent upon Oracle nor upon new forks of MySQL for their future. For pragmatical reasons – and those have always carried weight in the MySQL universe – MariaDB is part of the MySQL ecosystem.
Applications, teams, skills, investments, and use cases — all of it remains viable within the MariaDB part of the MySQL ecosystem.
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We’re excited to welcome TidesDB as a Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.
TidesDB’s sponsorship directly supports our mission to strengthen the MariaDB ecosystem and accelerate innovation through open, community-driven collaboration. Their commitment reflects a shared belief that open source databases thrive when strong technology and strong communities grow together.
Beyond sponsorship, TidesDB is contributing meaningful technology to the ecosystem through a new pluggable storage engine for MariaDB, designed for modern hardware. This integration expands the range of workloads MariaDB can serve while giving users and developers more choice, performance options, and flexibility.
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Continue reading “TidesDB becomes Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation”
The MariaDB Foundation is releasing the alpha version of the Test Automation Framework (TAF), an open-source benchmarking framework designed for clarity, repeatability, and vendor-neutral testing. TAF provides a structured way to run database benchmarks using consistent workloads, configuration, and reporting pipelines, making results easier to reproduce and discuss.
TAF has evolved into a modular system built around three plugin types: database maker plugins, test suite plugins, and report plugins. This architecture keeps the core stable while allowing contributors to extend the framework with new database engines, workloads, and reporting formats.
The alpha includes maker plugins for MariaDB and MySQL, test suites for Sysbench and HammerDB (TPROC-C and TPROC-H), and a set of report plugins for raw text, charts, and combined summaries.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Foundation Releases Alpha of the Test Automation Framework (TAF)”
We are delighted to announce that Epsio (https://www.epsio.io/) has joined the MariaDB Foundation as an official silver sponsor.
Epsio’s commitment to innovation and open technology aligns closely with the mission of the MariaDB Foundation: to support and advance the MariaDB ecosystem and strengthen the long-term viability of MariaDB as a reliable, open source database platform. Their sponsorship will help fuel community initiatives, foster collaboration, and expand opportunities for developers and organizations around the world.
“We are excited to partner with Epsio,” said Anna, CEO at the MariaDB Foundation. “Their support is a meaningful contribution to our work and reflects shared values in open source, performance, and community empowerment.”
Epsio’s sponsorship will directly support the Foundation’s core activities, including community programs, developer engagement, and educational initiatives that drive the growth and sustainability of MariaDB globally.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Foundation Welcomes Epsio as a Silver Sponsor”
The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 12.3.1, the release candidate (RC) in the new long-term support (LTS) release, and MariaDB 12.2.2, the latest stable rolling release.
MariaDB 12.3.1 features extensive improvements to the binary log, SQL standard and compatibility features including an XML data type, as well as replication and other general improvements.
MariaDB 12.2.2 features deeper Oracle compatibility, optimizer improvements and more optimizer hints, a removal of the depth limit of 32 from JSON functions, and other general improvements.
See the overview, release notes and changelogs for details. …
Inspired by my VERY long presentation on the topic at FOSDEM26 I thought I’d say a couple of words on how the contribution process works.
Contributing changes to MariaDB server is easy because it follows industry best practices: it’s using “normal” GitHub pull requests. Note that I’m working for the MariaDB Foundation. As such, “normal” for me is doing everything in the open, for everybody to see and participate. And all of the communication around the contribution (including the code review) is happening in that same pull request and is public. Until the intended end of the process: merging the pull request into the repository.
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Continue reading “The MariaDB contribution process: a step by step guide.”