Category Archives: Community
As Chief Development Officer of the MariaDB Foundation, I’ve worked to ensure that our development efforts focus where they matter most. On this final day of 2024, I want to reflect on the significant technical achievements we’ve accomplished and the collaborative processes that made them possible.
Our work this year has been driven by the goal of building a stronger, more engaged MariaDB community. By sharing our progress and learnings, I hope to provide insights that may inspire and support other open-source projects.
Finally, I’ll outline the Foundation’s vision for 2025 and how we plan to bring it to life.
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We’re no mind readers, so from time to time, we like to do polls. Polls are quantitative in nature, so coming up with the right question is not enough – we need to do a bit of mind reading in coming up with the alternatives.
Quick development of text based RAG apps
Our hypothesis was that RAG is the cool thing to do with vector based databases, and specifically text based RAG. The conference talks we’ve given on MariaDB Vector (such as at the 24th SFSCON in Bozen, Südtirol, Italy on 8 Nov 2024) have stressed the value of easily being able to develop AI applications that answer user prompts based on knowledge in a specific text mass, not on the overall training data of an LLM.
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Continue reading “What do you expect from vector storage in databases?”
Good news: IBM is upgrading their Gold sponsorship to Platinum!
Our trinity: Adoption, Openness, Continuity
The three pillars of MariaDB Foundation are Adoption, Openness, and Continuity.
Adoption means that we work towards MariaDB Server to be used everywhere, where you need databases. We think Open Source RDBMSes are the way to go, and we want you to choose MariaDB Server.
Openness means that we work towards making it easy for everyone to contribute towards making MariaDB Server the best Open Source RDBMS. Be it code, documentation, training materials, bug reports, feature requests.
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We have the date, we have the place , we have the theme! So we ask you to save the date.
Date: Saturday 1 Feb 2025 (10:00-17:00)
Place: Brussels, SQ Lily-Rose, Avenue Arnaud Fraiteur 15-23, close to FOSDEM
Theme: Vectors, RAG and all things new in MariaDB Server
Registration: Please register here with Meetup
With the Open Source community convening for FOSDEM, we have noted Brussels during the first weekend of February is a great time to meet, chat, and share news and ideas.
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Fifteen years ago, Internet Explorer made up about two-thirds of all browsers, Firefox the majority of the rest, while a newly-released browser called Chrome was starting to appear in the rankings.
Fifteen years ago, iPhone OS overtook Windows Mobile in worldwide smartphone market share, but still trailed the giants of Blackberry’s RIM and Symbian, used by market leader Nokia, while Google’s new Android ecosystem was just starting to show signs of momentum.
And in the database world, as Oracle moved to acquire MySQL, a new upstart called MariaDB was born as a fork of MySQL, birthed by MySQL founder Monty Widenius with the support of many of the original MySQL developers.
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Another quarter year has gone by, and in the world of MariaDB, it is time for another contributions report. The raw data for this report can be found on GitHub, here.
Server contributions
Just like last quarter, I’m going to start with a breakdown of all the organisations who have contributed to MariaDB Server so far this year.
| MariaDB Plc | 29 | 1262 |
| MariaDB Foundation | 6 | 123 |
| Codership | 7 | 77 |
| Independent | 17 | 57 |
| Amazon | 12 | 50 |
| Arch Linux | 1 | 6 |
| GSoC | 3 | 5 |
| IONOS | 1 | 4 |
| Alibaba | 1 | 3 |
| Rakuten | 1 | 3 |
| HardenedBSD | 1 | 2 |
| OpenBSD | 1 | 2 |
| University of Sydney | 1 | 2 |
| Arm | 1 | 1 |
| Chainguard | 1 | 1 |
| ClearCode | 1 | 1 |
| FreeBSD | 1 | 1 |
| IBM | 1 | 1 |
MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 8th October 2024
There have been some interesting things to note here.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, October 2024”
I recently helped two of our sponsors simultaneously, DBS Bank and MariaDB Plc, with a recent issue they were experiencing. This actually helped us add support for an extra cloud vendor. But before I tell the story, I first need to give a bit of background.
S3 Engine History
Back in 2019, we added the S3 engine to MariaDB Server. “S3” stands for “Simple Storage Service”, it was developed by Amazon, and it is pretty much the standard for storing objects (typically files) in the cloud. Almost every cloud vendor has their own object storage with an S3-compatible REST API.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Foundation assisting multiple vendors”
There are a number of SQL Fiddles, web interfaces to databases for testing / learning SQL. Recently we noticed the versions on these falling behind and not presenting users with updates that would deliver the latest MariaDB features and bug fixes.
In reaching out to the people that manage these fiddles we’re pleased to announce that so far, two providers have updated their MariaDB version(s).
PHPize.online / SQLize.online
PHPize.online and SQLize.online are the pet projects of Slava Rozhnev. These have both been updated and now have available MariaDB 11.4, our current long term support version, and also MariaDB 11.5.
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