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.

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.

Wrapping up the MariaDB Bucharest Meetup

This past Friday was reserved for our very own cozy event in Bucharest, planned by the romanian squad of the MariaDB Foundation. With an audience ranging from students just starting out on their journey up to seniors with experience in multiple database servers and AI, lots of interesting talks took place. We were glad to meet the Head of Domains and IT Technology of our gold sponsor, IONOS.

Although not his first visit in Romania, Monty’s attendance was a welcome sight, even bringing in people from the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom.

MariaDB’s AI RAG Hackathon is underway

We had the pleasure on Friday to take individual calls with everybody who submitted to the ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG hackathon

The ideation phase deadline passed last week, and we are happy to share that we received several promising submissions for both the innovation track and the integration track. Innovation involves applications using MariaDB Vector, like RAG, and integration being enabling MariaDB Vector in an existing framework. 

Participants range from individual contributors to even a corporate team. Some already have some experience with AI, and some are newcomers to RAG.

Last chance to apply to AI RAG Hackathon

The ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon is nearing its deadline on Monday (by end of March). 

We have several cool submissions so far. One is about combining the Knowledge Graph and LLMs, using MariaDB Vector Nearest Neighbour Search. Another one is about an “advanced context diff”, identifying the differences between two text corpuses based not on their literal wording, but on their content. 

All of the current submissions are in the Innovation track. We would particularly like submissions in the Integration track  – to add MariaDB to frameworks such as these, or other apps. 

One week left to join AI RAG Hackathon by Helsinki Python meetup (remote participation possible)

One week left to join the AI RAG Hackathon with MariaDB Vector and Python! 

Winners get to demo at the Helsinki Python meetup in May, receive merit and publicity from MariaDB Foundation and Open Ocean Capital, and prizes from Finnish verkkokauppa.com. 

To participate, gather a team (1-5 people) and submit an idea by the end of March for one of the two tracks. You then have until May 5th to develop the idea before the meetup 27th May.

  1. Integration track: Enable MariaDB Vector in an existing open source project or AI-framework.