Category Archives: Foundation
I wanted to share with you all some statistics on the incoming community contributions for the MariaDB server in the last year or so. And some of my thoughts looking at the data.
I’ve been quietly working on scripting some of my daily routines using the github CLI and the Jira REST API. Thanks to a question by Anna, the visionary MariaDB Foundation CEO, I’ve also created some scripts to fetch and summarize statistics on the incoming community contributions pull requests.
A picture’s worth a thousand words. So here we go:
This depicts the community pull requests opened or closed each month (the top graph).
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Continue reading “The Rising Tide of Community Contributions to MariaDB Server”
Why MariaDB is both its own database — and the natural continuation of MySQL
Because MariaDB is at the same time a completely independent database and a fundamentally compatible extension of MySQL, the MySQL user base is not dependent upon Oracle nor upon new forks of MySQL for their future. For pragmatical reasons – and those have always carried weight in the MySQL universe – MariaDB is part of the MySQL ecosystem.
Applications, teams, skills, investments, and use cases — all of it remains viable within the MariaDB part of the MySQL ecosystem.
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FOSDEM was exciting from a MariaDB perspective for many reasons this year. For this blog, let me concentrate on one aspect: The discussions at what was called the “Summit for MySQL Community, Europe”, hosted by Percona on Monday 2 Feb 2026 at the Marriott Grand Place in central Brussels.
We got the answer key – the “Oracle examiner’s solution”
With many of my former MySQL AB colleagues leaving Oracle over the years, I certainly had a fairly good picture of what has been happening at Oracle since I left the company shortly after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems was completed in 2009.
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Continue reading “Reading the Room: What Europe’s MySQL Community Is Really Saying”
MariaDB is the natural replacement for MySQL. Why? Because it is the organic continuation of the MySQL that conquered the Internet. MySQL 8.0 is a fork of that foundation, while MariaDB stayed on track.
That said, the MySQL fork is soft: Compatibility remains remarkable and migration back to the mothership is smooth.
As the Chairman of the MariaDB Foundation, and someone having joined MySQL AB’s management team in 2001, that is my response to the article As Oracle loses interest in MySQL, devs mull future options in The Register.
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Continue reading “MariaDB is the natural replacement for MySQL”
We are pleased to welcome Sylvain Arbaudie as a sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.
Sylvain Arbaudie is an independent consultant with extensive experience helping organisations design reliable, scalable data infrastructures. Having worked primarily with commercial systems early in his career, Sylvain has witnessed how open source has matured into a powerful foundation for innovation, technological sovereignty, and long-term freedom—often surpassing proprietary alternatives in robustness and adaptability.
Among relational databases he has followed—MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB—Sylvain sees MariaDB as standing apart through its clarity of design, integrated ecosystem, and enterprise-grade reliability. These qualities make it a strong choice for organisations of all sizes, from individual founders to global enterprises.
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Continue reading “Arbaudie.IT becomes silver sponsor of MariaDB Foundation”
At the MariaDB Foundation, clarity of purpose matters. In an ecosystem as foundational as open-source databases, confidence is built not through slogans, but through predictability, restraint, and long-term commitment.
As I reflect upon what we learned in 2025 and how we can serve the database community in 2026, one thought stands out: MariaDB is the natural successor to MySQL, as Oracle loses its interest in the development of what has been the default Open Source Relational DBMS.
The MariaDB Foundation recognises its responsibility. As uncertainty around MySQL’s long-term direction continues to grow, the global community of users, operators, and vendors quite reasonably seeks continuity.
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Continue reading “Making MariaDB the Natural Successor to MySQL”
It’s the time of the year to look back and reflect. In line with the holiday spirit, we’d like to highlight some of the MariaDB Server contributions from 2025 that the team found particularly inspiring and interesting, and to say thank you to everyone who submitted them.
At the end of the post, we invite the community to help us recognise the most impactful external contributions of the year.
- MDEV-36737 Research and Estimation for Adapting VIDEX to MariaDB: thank you, Haibo Yang (YoungHypo) and Rong Kang (kr11) from ByteDance for this very interesting contribution.
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Continue reading “A Year in Review: Notable External Contributions to MariaDB Server in 2025”
The Queen’s Seven Predictions for 2026
When Queen Isabella I of Castile agreed to fund Columbus, it was not because the idea felt daring or exciting. It was because the old routes were failing. Europe’s trade system had become expensive, fragile, and constrained, and maintaining it unchanged was no longer a neutral decision. Supporting the voyage was not an act of romance, but of governance: an acceptance that continuing as before carried greater risk than change.
Crucially, nothing collapsed overnight. Trade still flowed. Goods still arrived. But every journey became longer, costlier, and more politically exposed.
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