2016 in the MariaDB Foundation

We have been very busy in 2016 and early 2017 so this yearly report is long overdue, but we are glad we can report on so many positive things.

Good growth has been visible all over the MariaDB ecosystem, and the mariadb.org website had almost 1.9 million page views in 2016, a growth of 72% since 2015. We can conclude that 2016 was a successful year for MariaDB.

Active maintenance and active development

In 2016 there were 7 releases of the 5.5 series, 5 releases of the 10.0 series and 10 releases of the 10.1 series. …

MariaDB.org page views increased by 77%

It is over a year since the overhauled MariaDB.org was published. We immediately got a lot of positive feedback and now looking at the statistics a year later we are glad to report that the number of visits has grown by 28% and the amount of page views has grown a whopping 77% from 1,1 million to 1,9 million. That is a significant acceleration in growth when one considers that the growth of page views the previous year (from 2014 to 2015) was only 7%. Some of the growth can surely be attributed to a general trend of MariaDB getting more adoption, but in particular the growth of page views (77%) and the decrease of bounces (-37%) and the average session duration increase from 1 minute to 1½ minutes can be attributed to the redesign. …

Alibaba Cloud becomes a Platinum Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation

MariaDB Foundation today announced that Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has become its platinum sponsor. The sponsorship will help the Foundation in its goals to ensure continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem, and to drive adoption, serving an ever growing community of users and developers.
 
“Alibaba Cloud is committed to contributing to the open source community and empowering developers around the world. Today, more than one hundred thousand MySQL instances are running on our relational database services (ApsaraDB for RDS). We look forward to working closely with all the participants in the MariaDB ecosystem.” said Hong Tang, chief architect at Alibaba Cloud. …

MariaDB Foundation Board Changes

At the most recent MariaDB Foundation board meeting, MariaDB Corporation’s Rasmus Johansson stepped down as chair and from the board. He has been replaced by Booking.com’s Eric Herman as chair, and on the board by Michael Howard. Michael is the CEO of the MariaDB Corporation. Executive participation from the Corporation will support a good relationship between the Foundation and the Corporation, and the Foundation greatly appreciates all the work that the MariaDB Corporation is doing for the MariaDB server project.

The full composition of the board is:

  • Chair Eric Herman, Principal Developer at Booking.com
  • Michael “Monty” Widenius, MariaDB Foundation founder and CTO of MariaDB Corporation
  • Sergei Golubchik, Chief Architect at MariaDB Corporation, representing MariaDB developers
  • Espen Håkonsen, CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications
  • Michael Howard, CEO at MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB Foundation CEO Otto Kekäläinen serves as the secretary of the board. …

2016 MariaDB Developers Meetup Presentations

I’ve collected slides and videos from several of the presentations given at the MariaDB Developers Meetup in Amsterdam, 6-8 October 2016. This meetup was kindly hosted by Booking.com. The presentations are listed here in roughly the order they were given. If I have both the slides and video for a given talk I link to both, otherwise I just link to what I have. The video is of poor quality as it was livestreamed to Periscope from a handheld mobile phone. Network issues also mean the streams sometimes dropped and had to be restarted. I will update this post as a receive slide decks from other speakers. …

New MariaDB Foundation staff member sponsored by Alibaba: Lixun Peng

The MariaDB Foundation is happy to announce that today a new staff member, Lixun Peng, has started working as a Senior Developer of MariaDB. Lixun’s work is sponsored by Alibaba, and he also holds the title of Staff Database Engineer at Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba is a China-based e-commerce company founded in 1999. It has grown to be one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world with a market value of over 200 billion euros. There are more than one hundred thousand mysqld instances in Alibaba Cloud RDS (Alibaba’s database cloud service). Through its history, Alibaba has used MySQL/MariaDB and has now also sponsored the MariaDB Foundation. …

MariaDB Server is a true open source project

The mission of the MariaDB Foundation is to ensure continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem. We facilitate the development of the MariaDB Server and the related connectors as listed on our GitHub account. Core to us is to enable and foster collaboration so that contributing is meaningful and produces results for everybody.

Here are some of the things we do to ensure true open source:

MariaDB Foundation financial report for 2015

The 2015 accounting for the MariaDB Foundation has been completed and the key figures are:

  • Total income: 272 827,95 USD
  • Total expenses: 276 684,73 USD
  • Net income after adjustments: 1 337,34 USD

Staff costs were about 240 000 USD. Travel costs were only about 3 000 USD. The remaining 35 000 USD is administration (accounting, finances, legal) and other expenses. As some of our staff cost is also administration (mostly the CEO) we can estimate that about 83 % (230k out of 276k) goes to software development related activities (including documentation and packaging), so we are quite efficient on how the funds are used. …