A Year in Review: Notable External Contributions to MariaDB Server in 2025

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.

Choosing New Routes

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.

Mirror, Mirror on DB-Engines: The MariaDB Story

Mirror, mirror on the wall — what do you measure when you measure us all?
Is it skill, or is it voice?
Is it code, or is it conversation?
DB-Engines is not a looking glass of perfection, but a mirror of perception — reflecting the chorus of those who search, speak, teach, compare, and build. And like every enchanted mirror, it shows not only what is, but what the world believes it sees.

MariaDB today stands firmly among the world’s top relational databases.
Not by inheritance, and not by illusion, but by the millions who use it, trust it, and shape it.

Redgate joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor

We’re delighted to welcome Redgate as a new Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.

Redgate is well known across the database world for software solutions which reliably solve the challenges of database management – enabling secure, scalable and AI-ready databases. Their products support database DevOps, monitoring, and compliance across many technologies – and we’re proud to see MariaDB added to that ecosystem.

At MariaDB Foundation, our mission is to ensure the continuity and openness of MariaDB as a community-developed database. Every new sponsor strengthens that mission – not only financially, but by deepening collaboration across the broader database landscape.

Zencoder becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation

MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce that Zencoder has joined as a Silver Sponsor.

Zencoder describes itself as “a universal AI platform focused on integrating generative coding workflows into existing developer tools and infrastructure. Connect any CLI to any IDE, starting with Claude Code, Codex and Zen CLI, while leveraging Zencoder’s proprietary enterprise-grade features like multi-repo intelligence. The platform supports on-premise, hybrid, or cloud deployment, with air-gapped and zero-VPC options to maintain enterprise security. Through modular ‘Zen Agents’, Zencoder codifies team practices into shareable, autonomous workflows that continuously code, test, and deploy.”

AI and databases: a natural alignment

AI-powered development inevitably depends on databases.

BangPypers x MariaDB Python Hackathon – Winners Announced!

Last Saturday marked an exciting milestone: the announcement of the winners in our first large-scale MariaDB Python Hackathon, organised in collaboration with BangPypers, HackerEarth, and MariaDB plc. Over the past months, developers from across India have explored new ways to make MariaDB easier to use, more connected, and better integrated into today’s most important open-source ecosystems.

This post celebrates the outstanding contributions in both the Integration Track — projects that help MariaDB work seamlessly with other tools and frameworks – and the Innovation Track – projects that showcase existing MariaDB features and make it easy to learn, copy, and adapt.

How deep can a bug be?

Last year I filed a bug report MDEV-33603 on what a looked like a benign problem with an optimizer taking a different code path in a particular trivial looking test. Its benign looking nature lead to me not looking at it until last week. The “benign” bug as it turned out is a bug in an OpenSSL optimization on IBM POWER, which maybe not the lowest level of “How deep”, but its certainly a long way from the high level (above storage engines) optimizer decisions in MariaDB.

Image by: Valerie Hinojosa on WikiMedia Commons

I feel I need to start this story justifying why it was left so long.

Welcoming Wolf Software Systems Ltd as a New Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation

We are excited to announce that Wolf Software Systems Ltd has joined the MariaDB Foundation as a new Silver sponsor! Their support helps strengthen our shared mission of advancing open-source database technology, and we warmly welcome them into our community.

Who are Wolf Software Systems Ltd?

Our active intelligence platform (AIP) “IntelligentWolf” is designed for businesses that have outgrown rigid systems. While passive analytics tools like Power BI are read-only, Intelligentwolf connects your entire tech stack into a single layer that can both read and write data and analyse with AI and vector embedding.