The Story of our Sea Lion

Why a sea lion? That’s a question we get every now and then, most recently at FOSDEM.

Here is the story:

Our Founder Monty likes animals in the sea. For MySQL, he picked a dolphin, after swimming with them in the Florida Keys. For the MariaDB sea lion, there was a similar encounter.

It happened when Monty and his older daughter My were snorkeling on one of the islands in the Galapagos. Something big, brown and fast suddenly appeared at an arm’s distance, laughing in their faces.

FOSDEM Reflections / MySQL – MariaDB DevRoom

What a great place for informal interactions, strengthening the network, and hearing the latest news from the grapevine! Last weekend 1.-3. Feb 2019, over 8000 developers met in Brussels for FOSDEM 2019.

For the overall atmosphere, take a look at this 1:05 long video by Sofia Ek.

MariaDB Foundation was present with six staff people (Ian Gilfillan, Vicențiu Ciorbaru, Teodor Ionita, Robert Bîndar, Zak Greant and myself) and two board members (Eric Herman from Booking.com and Serg Golubchik from MariaDB Corporation).

Easier licensing of MCAs for MariaDB contributors

Software licensing is a difficult subject that we don’t usually want to think about. It can be confusing and frustrating trying to work out whether different licenses are compatible, and problems like dual-licensing make it even harder. We all just want to write great code, not worry about licenses!

Until now, contributors who provide improvements and bug fixes to MariaDB have been asked to declare their license choice every time they make a contribution. For new contributors, or those who just want to submit a very small fix, this can be a complicated extra step they weren’t expecting. For regular contributors, it’s extra work for every single pull request. …

2019 Developers Unconference, New York

February in New York City is again MariaDB time, and the first MariaDB Developers Unconference of 2019 will take place on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 February, with Hudson River Trading as kind hosts.

The event is free to attend and you can join for the entire weekend, or as little time as you wish. However, it is essential to sign up in advance on the event page at Meetup.com.

The schedule of this unconference is being drafted in a public spreadsheet. Please add suggestions for sessions you would like to present or lead on this spreadsheet. …

MariaDB Foundation at the Google Mentor Summit


The MariaDB Foundation has had 2 projects accepted for Google Summer of Code 2018, of which one we deemed successful. Teodor Niculescu (teodorvicentiuniculescu@gmail.com)’s work was part of an effort to improve MariaDB’s query optimiser by providing faster histogram collection using equal-width histograms. His project is not yet in a release worthy state, yet we are working alongside him to get it feature complete (hopefully for our 10.4 version). We are glad that Teodor has chosen to present his work at the MariaDB Developer Unconference in Tampere and also remain within the community, although currently busy with his studies as is expected. …

My first week, Looking Forward

First of all, thank you for your warm words of welcome – coming from so many people across different media, I think this is a very positive sign for working with the organisations and individuals within the MariaDB community.

Regardless of the situation, a change like this, or actually the person that comes in, is often described as a “new broom”.  So I’m a new broom.  This can provide a fresh start throughout, with an opportunity to clean up some stuff that is outdated, improve a few things, and execute new initiatives.

In my first week as CEO I’ve been talking with all our staff and of course reading  up on many things.  …

Hello World from the new MariaDB Foundation CEO: Arjen Lentz

It’s both my pleasure and honour to write this post.  Quite a few of you will know (of) me, but since that’s not necessarily the case I’ll try and make this a quick intro, as well as laying out some aspects of my thoughts and plans for the near future.

Who is Arjen?

A long time ago now, I was employee#25 at MySQL AB.  During that period (2001-2007) I worked on the MySQL reference manual and built the docs team, spoke at many conferences, user groups and events, built the global community relations team and its activities, was program chair for the 2005 and 2006 MySQL Users’ Conference, taught training courses, and represented the company in Australia. …

MariaDB on HackerOne

We are pleased to announce the launch of our public bug bounty program on the HackerOne platform:

https://hackerone.com/mariadb

The aim for this program is two fold:

  1. Review the vulnerability submission channels, guidelines and policy for responsible disclosure, as well as asset identification and vulnerability handling process on our side.
  2. Encourage researchers to look for vulnerabilities in MariaDB code and have a way to incentivize reporting in accordance with the responsible disclosure model.

Goal no.1 resulted in changes to our general vulnerability classification process described at mariadb.org/about/security-policy/.  We now have two kinds of vulnerabilities, Critical and Medium severity, as well as a policy that should act as a guideline to the reporter as well as our team to ensure proper vulnerability management. …