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 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. 

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.

  1. Integration track: Enable MariaDB Vector in an existing open source project or AI-framework.

This month in MariaDB Foundation: Feb 2025

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.

Join our AI Hackathon with MariaDB Vector

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.

Report from the Board

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

This month in MariaDB Foundation: Jan 2025

Focus, focus, focus! That’s the mantra of any successful organisation. With great input from our Board, we’ve managed to condense our strategic planning for 2025 into six goals.

Refiguring the process – from descriptive to prescriptive

Our goal setting started from mapping out our activities 2024. I asked myself: “How can we describe what we do on one page?”. There were 38 activities – think “Scrum Epics” – in 6 areas.

Guess what? That’s too many. No Board member is interested in that level of detail. Oh well, I should have known.

Back to the drawing board.

MariaDB 11.7.2 and MariaDB 11.8.1 now available

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 11.8.1, the Release Candidate (RC) in the long-term MariaDB 11.8 release, and MariaDB 11.7.2, the latest Generally Available (GA) rolling release.

See the release notes and changelogs for details, as well as the MariaDB 11.8.LTS announcement.


Download MariaDB 11.8.1

Release Notes Changelog What is MariaDB 11.8?


Download MariaDB 11.7.2

Release Notes Changelog What is MariaDB 11.7?

MariaDB 11.8 is LTS

Confirming what you probably already expected: MariaDB Server 11.8 will be a long-term support release. 

Now a Release Candidate – GA in May

With MariaDB Vector as the lead new feature, MariaDB 11.8 succeeds the previous LTS MariaDB 11.4 from a year ago.

As of now, MariaDB 11.8 is at the Release Candidate stage, with GA planned for May.

Lots of new features since MariaDB 11.4

MariaDB 11.8 has about 60 features, large and small, on top of the previous LTS, MariaDB 11.4. At our recent MariaDB Day on 1 Feb 2025 in Brussels, MariaDB Corporation Chief Architect Sergei Golubchik gave an overview of 11.8.