MariaDB Vector is available on OPEA

I think you’ve come to expect that every collaboration with Intel leads to meaningful, well-executed projects that bring great value to the community. This time, we’re spreading our wings towards empowering enterprises to deploy AI solutions, and we’re excited to show how MariaDB Vector fits into the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA).

🤖 Open Platform for Enterprise AI

The Open Platform for Enterprise AI, or simply OPEA, is a new sandbox-level project within the LF AI & Data Foundation where Intel plays a pivotal role in its active development and once again it shows its strong commitment to open-source innovation.

Impressive Submissions at the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon

On Monday we had our final submission day for the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon. We got several high quality replies in both tracks: integration and innovation.

The quality was so high that we are keen to replicate this hackathon in other locations and are currently looking for cooperation partners. We are truly grateful to the Helsinki Python meetup group without which this would not have been possible. They have a great community, organise excellent events, and played a key role in making the hackathon happen.

We are now reviewing the submissions together with the Helsinki Python meetup group.

Amazon’s AI-agents for MariaDB Contributions

We at MariaDB Foundation are thrilled to see Amazon at the forefront of applying artificial intelligence to open source contributions — with MariaDB as their pilot. 

At the May 6th MariaDB meetup in Bremen, Bardia Hassanzadeh, PhD, presented the Upstream Pilot tool: an AI-based assistant designed to help developers identify, analyze, and resolve open issues in MariaDB more effectively.

This initiative is the most promising we’ve seen for improving the open source contribution process. Bardia and Hugo Wen of Amazon gave us a preview last week and we were already very impressed.

The Queen, the contributions and the wardrobe

I suppose not all of my readers have a first hand (or even second hand) experience of the girls-night-in. So let me shed some light on this sacred ritual of tea, sympathy and soul-baring conversation that zigzags from the ridiculous to the profound and back again in under 30 seconds.

There a few eternal mysteries that always seem to come up –
Like:
“Why do I have nothing to wear when my wardrobe is clearly full of clothes?”
And:
“Why does cat food smell weirdly delicious?”
(Okay, I do know the answer to that one: stop crash-dieting already!

MariaDB Vector and RAG at foss-north 2025

I had the delight of being accepted to talk about “Making AI transparent with RAG on your own data” at foss-north 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden. On April 14th at Chalmers University, I got to share with a full room on how AI RAG is done with MariaDB Vector, kicking off with a use case about scaling Wikipedia editing with GenAI.

Improving Wikipedia with RAG

I presented a use case example from my experience of editing Wikipedia at scale with GenAI for non-profit Projekt Fredrika.

MariaDB Catalogs preview containers available

We’ve made significant progress on MariaDB Catalogs, and while there’s still work to be done, we’re excited to offer the community an easy way to try out our preview release. You no longer need to compile the source code yourself—just use our prebuilt containers, now available on our official quay.io development registry.

The code is available publicly on Github, in a separate repo compared to the official MariaDB Server (until the feature gets published as part of an official MariaDB Server release)

Documentation is available on the Knowledge Base.

Deep dive into Clang sanitizer testing with MariaDB

MariaDB uses Clang’s memory, address, and undefined behavior sanitizers are used for identify coding flaws during the continuous development and testing process. MariaDB would like to share via an online event on how easy perform the same sanitizer checking.

The MemorySanitizer environment is particularly onerous to create. Because MariaDB use container based build and testing, we have an environment that can be re-used by anyone.

Our “Deep Dives” were once an internal skills transfer mechanism, however for the first time we’re making it available for anyone to join.

This particular deep dive will cover:

Tell us how to DROP USER!

Shortly, we will start coding a task, for which we would appreciate your input: How would you like to DROP USER?

Why do we ask?

DROP user (originating in MySQL in 2004) always used to just drop the account from the privilege tables, but left all existing connections active. You can argue that this was questionable in 2004, but it’s really unexpected and confusing in 2025, with MariaDB being ubiquitous as it is.

So now we’re considering changing it.

But changing a 20-year-old behavior cannot be done lightly. We want to ask
you, our users, what would you prefer DROP USER to do.