Category Archives: Contributions
The following post was written by Stefano Petrilli, who contributed UUIDv4 and UUIDv7 implementations to MariaDB. Thank you, Stefano!
The original version of the Universal Unique IDentifiers (UUID), which is now known as UUIDv1, made his first appearance in the 1980s. The most interesting guarantee that they provide is the generation of IDs that are always unique across space and time.
To comply with this promise, it uses a combination of three elements:
- The node, which is a field that identifies the machine that generated the UUID.
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At MariaDB Day in February in Brussels, VP Engineering Vicențiu Ciurbaru delivered an inspiring presentation titled “Launch Your Open Source Career: First Steps in Contributing to MariaDB.”
In the spirit of the recent positive stats on new contributions to MariaDB, let me recap Vicentiu’s tips for anyone looking to make their first contribution.
Contributing to MariaDB is not only about writing code—it’s about joining a vibrant community where every contribution, big or small, drives innovation. We hope newcomers can see a tangible path to getting involved.
How to start contributing?
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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 job done, and there is an Open Source project that almost does it already.
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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 pull request introduces a new statement, amen, which serves as an alternative to the traditional commit command in MariaDB. The motivation behind this change is to provide a more thematic and culturally resonant way to conclude transactions, reflecting the religious connotation of the name “MariaDB”.
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Continue reading ““Amen” statement for committing transactions”
Here comes the Q4 2024 contributions report. The raw data which contains also statistics until today 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 during 2024.
| MariaDB Plc. | 31 | 1707 |
| MariaDB Foundation | 9 | 201 |
| Codership | 7 | 103 |
| Amazon | 12 | 51 |
| Independent | 19 | 48 |
| GSoC | 3 | 14 |
| Arch Linux | 1 | 6 |
| Alibaba | 1 | 4 |
| IONOS | 1 | 4 |
| Workato | 1 | 4 |
| Rakuten | 1 | 3 |
| OpenBSD | 1 | 2 |
| HardenedBSD | 1 | 2 |
| University of Sydney | 1 | 2 |
| Arm | 1 | 1 |
| ClearCode | 1 | 1 |
| FreeBSD | 1 | 1 |
| IBM | 1 | 1 |
| NetBSD | 1 | 1 |
| Chainguard | 1 | 1 |
| CloudLinux | 1 | 1 |
| TOTAL | 96 | 2158 |
MariaDB Server contributions for from 1st January 2024 – 31st December 2024
We can see some new names compared to the Q3 2024 report, with contributions from CloudLinux, NetBSD and Workato.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Contribution Statistics, January 2025”
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”
MariaDB Vector preview was recently released, bringing much awaited Vector Search functionality to MariaDB Server. One of the major open source contributors to MariaDB Vector has been Amazon. To share the excitement and get an inside view about what it’s like to contribute to MariaDB Server, I had a chat with software engineer Hugo Wen on the Amazon RDS team.
Hugo’s contributions to MariaDB Vector
Hugo Wen’s work on vector similarity search in MariaDB and MySQL started when Amazon’s leadership identified Vector Search functionality as a critical addition and decided to invest Amazon RDS team’s time on contributing to MariaDB Vector.
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On the 3rd of July, two weeks ago, I created a poll to ask about the future of feature development branches in MariaDB Server. Specifically, whether we should switch to a rolling model which is more familiar to users of services such as GitHub.
The votes we received gave a very clear result. Today I will share the conclusions we drew, as well as setting expectations for what will happen next.
Recap: what is this “main” branch all about?
In a rolling model, there is one main branch of the tree that all the feature commits go into (typically called “main”), and this is then forked when it is time to prepare a major release.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Server GitHub branches: Moving to “main””