Blog
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Why contribute? Scratch your own itch!
Scratch you own itch, and help others while at it!
Why do people contribute to Open Source projects?
The question is as old as Open Source and its predecessor Free Software: Why do people contribute? We re-asked the oldie-but-goodie, and got results that confirm the old adage about scratching your own itch.
Fixing work or personal needs
The most popular answer? Fixing work or personal needs. It got 44 %, nearly half the votes. You simply need to get the […]
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“Amen” statement for committing transactions
Every once in a while a truly inspiring contribution comes to us at MariaDB. Today’s timely contribution was from Sigma, and their inspiring contribution was in pull request 3937 which adds the AMEN statement for committing transactions. The need for harmonizing cultural norms with SQL standards is largely under explored aspect of engineering and here seems to be a good a place to start as any.
As described:
This contribution was complete with working test cases and followed our template, […]
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MariaDB, an Open Source Alternative
We live in a world where national interests intertwine with IT vendor interests. Interest is currently booming in “European Alternatives“. I’m happy to note that MariaDB Server is unaffected by considerations related to protectionism. In fact, choosing Open Source protects the user – an individual, an organisation, or a government – from protectionism itself.
Licensing prevails over national interests
Politicians come and go. National interests prevail a bit longer than individual politicians.Companies also evolve, get acquired and merged across national […]
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The Accidental Queen of the Database Dominion – Month one
Exactly one month ago, I found myself stepping into the role of CEO at MariaDB Foundation. It was a bit like being handed the keys to a beloved old ship and being told, “Don’t worry, it mostly steers itself… unless there’s a storm. Or a kraken. Or a GitHub issue.”
As someone whose surname gives away a bit of context, it’s both an honor and a deeply personal journey to be entrusted with stewarding this next chapter. I used to […]
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Last chance to apply to AI RAG Hackathon
The ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon is nearing its deadline on Monday (by end of March).
We have several cool submissions so far. One is about combining the Knowledge Graph and LLMs, using MariaDB Vector Nearest Neighbour Search. Another one is about an “advanced context diff”, identifying the differences between two text corpuses based not on their literal wording, but on their content.
All of the current submissions are in the Innovation track. We would particularly like […]
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A Conversation with Michal Schorm: MariaDB in Red Hat and Fedora
In a recent conversation, I had the pleasure of speaking with Michal Schorm, the maintainer of MariaDB packages for Red Hat and Fedora – and newly elected Observer on the MariaDB Foundation Board. Our discussion covered his role, the current state of MariaDB in these distributions, and ideas for future improvements.
The Role of a MariaDB Package Maintainer
Michal is responsible for ensuring that the MariaDB source code is compiled and made available as installable packages for Fedora, CentOS Stream, […]
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Give MariaDB Jira votes and comments
MariaDB has had a voting feature in its issue tracker Jira since the dawn of time, but it hasn’t got much active attention. Despite that, there are now many Jira community items that have collected a fair amount of votes over the years.
Many items are now in limbo—not on the MariaDB road map, but not rejected either. We would like to better understand how to act on these.
More votes, and preferably more detailed comments on syntax and desired […]
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One week left to join AI RAG Hackathon by Helsinki Python meetup (remote participation possible)
One week left to join the AI RAG Hackathon with MariaDB Vector and Python!
Winners get to demo at the Helsinki Python meetup in May, receive merit and publicity from MariaDB Foundation and Open Ocean Capital, and prizes from Finnish verkkokauppa.com.
To participate, gather a team (1-5 people) and submit an idea by the end of March for one of the two tracks. You then have until May 5th to develop the idea before the meetup 27th May.
We are […]