MariaDB Contribution Statistics, July 2024

We are half way through the year! Where has the time gone?! This means that is time to talk contributions statistics. The raw data used for this blog post can be found on the metrics GitHub repo.

Server contributions so far

The following table contains the basic contribution stats for MariaDB Server in 2024 so far. We have contributions from almost twice as many non-MariaDB organisations as last quarter, which is fantastic to see. The more varied our contribution sources, the better.

OrganisationContributorsCommits
MariaDB Plc 29 923
MariaDB Foundation 6 64
Codership 6 48
Independent 13 41
Amazon 11 28
Arch Linux 1 6
GSoC 2 4
Alibaba 1 2
OpenBSD 1 2
University of Sydney 1 2
ARM 1 1
FreeBSD 1 1
IBM 1 1
Chainguard 1 1

MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 2nd July 2024

Just like last time, we can almost do a like-for-like 2023 Q2 and 2024 Q2 comparison.

Why I keep choosing MariaDB

Users of open source software don’t always share their stories, simply because they are satisfied. That’s why we were delighted to accept an offer from database expert Richard Bensley to share why he has repeatedly used MariaDB over the years. 

I had a chat with Richard and learnt that he has seen MariaDB as a user, customer, and even an employee of MariaDB. Despite experimenting with other solutions, new and old, his passion for MariaDB and the people behind hasn’t faltered. 

Richard has been using MariaDB in large scale production since 2012 for financial platforms, CRMs and e-commerce for regional and international use.

MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Have your say

Many countries in the world right now are hosting elections, in fact, my own country’s election is tomorrow. MariaDB Foundation is also asking for you to make one more vote on our own kind of referendum.

We have recently had a request by a member of the community to change how we use GitHub, in a way that, in-theory, will make things easier for community contributors. I’ll explain the current situation, the proposal and then the poll.

Current situation

At the moment, if you want to develop a new feature for MariaDB Server, it needs to be developed against the latest version branch, which is the default branch when you view on GitHub.

Attending SuseCon24

Last week MariaDB was present at SuseCon, both MariaDB Foundation as well as representatives from MariaDB Plc. The MariaDB Foundation has never attended SuseCon in the past, so this was an exciting new event for us. I’ll give you my view on the event and why I think it is a great event for the Open Source Software community.

The conference motto – #choice

SUSE’s focus is not on prescribing a particular technology, rather empowering its users to make the best choice for their situation. Most products in SUSE’s line-up work with multiple distributions and multiple software platforms.

MariaDB 11.6.0 preview release available

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 11.6.0, a preview release in the MariaDB 11.6 series. MariaDB 11.6 is a rolling release.

See the release notes for details.


Download MariaDB 11.6.0

Release Notes What is MariaDB 11.6?


Thanks, and enjoy MariaDB! …

Improving MariaDB support in open source projects

As part of MariaDB’s efforts in Adoption, we have been working on support of MariaDB in open source projects. 

The open source projects we have been looking at range from well known, ready to use projects like WordPress or MediaWiki (that Wikipedia runs on), to under-the-hood solutions like ORMs that connect software with databases for countless other open source and private projects.

MariaDB is the de facto standard that many projects and users are running. As MariaDB diverges, matures and develops on its own path from MySQL, especially in later versions, it’s not enough to shrug off compatibility questions with “MariaDB is a drop-in MySQL replacement – everybody knows that”.

UBI based Docker Official Images

We launched Red Hat UBI based Docker Official Images for MariaDB! These are available on Docker Hub with tags containing ubi including lts-ubi.

The MariaDB plc folks suggested this would be good for enterprise users. After dusting of an old prototype, jointly developing the image, a couple of requests for packages into the UBI repository, and running through our test suite for compatibility testing, there is now an image available for everyone that will be maintained.

Attention to the Red Hat Open Shift Certification Policy made some compliance changes to the UBI based MariaDB image.

Start of Life for MariaDB 11.6

We normally announce releases and the end of life of releases, but today we are going to try something a little different, an announcement of “start of life”.

What does this mean?

The way we use GitHub is a little different to most projects. Instead of having a mainline and branching versions from that, MariaDB Server creates a new branch from the previous version. This is intended to happen shortly after the preview release of the previous version, but for various reasons it can come a little later. So by default, after the hypothetical version 11.7.0 is released, we will create the 11.8 branch in GitHub soon after.