MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions Nominees: Sumit Srivastava

Interview with Sumit Srivastava, nominated in the Adoption & Industry Impact category.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sumit Srivastava, SVP Business Development & Products at Tayana, a Bangalore-based telecom software company. Sumit was nominated for championing MariaDB adoption in the telecommunications industry and its demonstration of open-source database delivering performance, scalability, and business impact in mission-critical systems. Like me, Sumit sits between technical and business — “the business people think I’m technical, and the technical people think I’m business,” as he put it. It made a lively conversation.

The Interview

Kaj: Sumit, Congratulations on your nomination.

The Power Of The Community!

Inspired by some recent LinkedIn posts, I decided to take the AI in my own hands and do some stats on the MariaDB and MySQL repositories.

This graph is what I’ve got.

Not only have MariaDB Server distinct contributors surpassed the distinct MySQL Server contributors count! The External MariaDB contributors alone did! *

This is how the Power Of the Community looks like!

  • You get to use a more functional, performant and error free MariaDB Server
  • ⁠⁠You get a say in shaping the future of the MariaDB Server.

Celebrating the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lions Champions Nominees

The MariaDB Foundation Sea Lions Champions recognize individuals and organizations that strengthen the MariaDB ecosystem through technical excellence, community leadership, open-source stewardship, ecosystem impact, and real-world adoption.

This first edition’s nominees reflect the diversity and strength of the MariaDB Community: developers, educators, advocates, companies, community organizers, and partners who help MariaDB grow as an open, collaborative, and industry-relevant database platform.

Each nomination highlights a different way to strengthen the database ecosystem and help MariaDB remain open, useful, and innovative.

Technical Excellence

The Technical Excellence category highlights people who contribute deep technical expertise, engineering quality, and innovation around MariaDB and the broader database ecosystem.

MariaDB Community Server Corrective Releases

If you are a Galera user, you are strongly recommended to upgrade ASAP!

MariaDB Community Server corrective releases are now available for the currently maintained long-term series. These releases address critical CVEs, and we strongly recommend that all users review the security advisories and upgrade as soon as possible.

These are Stable (GA) releases and are recommended for users running the corresponding MariaDB Server series.

A New Pull Request Processing Time Record

We have a new record average time to process a pull request: 21 days!

Part of my job is following (and trying to improve of course) some key metrics about MariaDB Server pull request processing. As a part of that I compile a nice pull request metric and a graph of it. This is what it looked like for the last month:

There’s a single number that caught my attention: 21.05 ! This is a new record low! That’s how much it takes on average from opening a pull request to closing it for all the requests closed last month!

MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS Released

The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS, the latest Long Term Support release of MariaDB Server. The first GA of the 12.3 series is 12.3.2.

MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS includes the features and improvements introduced during the MariaDB 12.x development series and provides a stable release line for production environments requiring long-term maintenance.

Highlights

MariaDB Server 12.3 LTS includes improvements across several areas of the server, including binary logging, SQL compatibility, replication, optimizer behavior, security, GIS, JSON, and general server usability.

Important

In MariaDB 12.3, innodb_snapshot_isolation defaults to ON

As we wanted to be correct when using REPEATBLE READ isolation level, we changed the default of the InnoDB snapshot isolation.

ProxySQL joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor

We are very pleased to welcome ProxySQL as a Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.

ProxySQL is the leading proxy for MySQL and has recently focused on supporting more and more of MariaDB, both with the Proxy and with other open-source projects ProxySQL is stewarding, like dbdeployer and orchestrator.

I had the chance to interview René Cannaò, CEO of ProxySQL.

Why is it important for ProxySQL to sponsor an organization like the MariaDB Foundation?

ProxySQL was born within the MySQL ecosystem, and MariaDB has always been an important part of it.

Drupal recommends MariaDB

MariaDB is now clearly listed as the recommended database in Drupal’s official documentation. Following community discussion on Drupal.org, the Database server requirements now lists MariaDB first, and identifies it as the recommended database for Drupal 10, 11, and 12. Drupal is a major open source content management system—a flexible platform used by a substantial share of websites globally. 

We’re glad to see this. Recognition matters because MariaDB is often used but documented as MySQL, going unnoticed under the hood—and when it goes unnamed, the work behind it loses visibility, a point Anna Widenius made in “I Am Not Building Cadillacs Anymore“, on how Henry Ford was long mistaken for the company that took his designs and became Cadillac.