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 say that I have done my bit for the project by adding “Maria” to “MariaDB”, but what do you know it turns out – there is a lot more out there for me to do!!!
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Continue reading “The Accidental Queen of the Database Dominion – Month one”
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 submissions in the Integration track – to add MariaDB to frameworks such as these, or other apps.
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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, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
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Continue reading “A Conversation with Michal Schorm: MariaDB in Red Hat and Fedora”
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 functionality or insights on use cases, would help the MariaDB Foundation and Corporation a lot in deciding what to do and how to prioritize resources.
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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.
- Integration track: Enable MariaDB Vector in an existing open source project or AI-framework.
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“The act of measuring disturbs the system and changes its state.” is a quote attributed to Werner Heisenberg. While I am uncertain about whether Heisenberg ever uttered those exact words, I am certain that the quote “What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed” is a management adage that gets a lot of negative publicity, deservedly so.
Metrics Not Considered Harmful
Yet, metrics can be helpful. MariaDB Foundation is far from overmeasuring pointy-haired-boss numbers, and in February, we made an attempt at systematically creating a meaningful metric that is easy to calculate.
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Continue reading “This month in MariaDB Foundation: Feb 2025”
We are excited to announce a hackathon with MariaDB Vector and Python. Since we are reaching outside our bubble, let’s start from the beginning:
MariaDB, the open-source database powers the world’s most demanding applications, from Wikipedia to global financial institutions. Now MariaDB Vector is bringing AI-ready vector search natively into the open-source database world. MySQL users ahoy:
Our hackathon is your chance to explore AI possibilities with MariaDB Vector and Python. Whether you’re a developer, data scientist, or AI enthusiast, MariaDB Foundation invites you to build innovative AI applications, compete for prizes, and showcase your work.
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Continue reading “Join our AI Hackathon with MariaDB Vector”
Openness, Adoption, Continuity: You’ve heard me repeating our mantra like a broken record. Today is the next episode – and the theme du jour is about our Board Meetings, which we have minuted publicly on https://mariadb.org/bodminutes/ since October 2020.
At last Wednesday’s Board Meeting, we made quite a few important decisions – let me draw your attention to them in this separate blog entry.
Ex officio: Michael Widenius and Sergei Golubchik
First, we properly documented the special role of our founding Board members, Michael Widenius and Sergei Golubchik.
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