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. 

This Month in MariaDB Foundation: September 2025

September was a month of big ideas, long-term thinking, and vibrant community energy for the MariaDB Foundation. Our Board of Directors met for what may well have been the most strategic session in Foundation history – and our community, in parallel, pushed the frontiers of innovation in AI, open source collaboration, and real-world adoption.

Let’s take a tour through the highlights — and yes, a few of these stories carried over into early October, simply because we had too much good news to contain in one month.

Strategic Vision: Strengthening the MariaDB Board

Our late-September Board of Directors meeting was all about looking ahead.

From Vision to Action: Strengthening the MariaDB Foundation Board – Welcome, Frank Karlitschek!

Strengthening the Board with industry leaders is a key goal for the MariaDB Foundation in 2025 – and beyond.

At the MariaDB Foundation, we believe that leadership in open source isn’t just about code — it’s about courage, community, and conviction. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Frank Karlitschek, founder and CEO of Nextcloud, has joined the MariaDB Foundation Board.

This is more than a new appointment — it’s a signal of where we’re heading as a Foundation: towards deeper collaboration with open-source and database pioneers who share our European values and our vision for digital independence.

When Oracle Drops the Ball: Why MariaDB is the Future of the MySQL World

The news has circulated quietly in industry corners, but the implications are far too significant to brush aside: Oracle seems to have ended the Open Source era of MySQL.

I am not a spokesperson for Oracle, yet the signs are unmistakable. Entire teams associated with MySQL at Oracle have been dissolved, spanning engineering, development and sales. On LinkedIn, I’ve received a wave of messages from former colleagues — both long-time MySQL veterans and those who joined Oracle years after MariaDB was founded in 2009.

The impression is clear: Oracle has made a rational business decision to pivot towards AI and cloud, where MySQL only matters insofar as it strengthens OCI and Heatwave.

Passbolt becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation

MariaDB Foundation is delighted to announce that Passbolt has joined as a Silver Sponsor, further strengthening the European open source ecosystem.Passbolt is the European open source platform for secure credential collaboration. It can be used for managing passwords, secrets, and privileged accesses. Passbolt is built for security-conscious tech teams while remaining usable by everyone. It adapts to a large variety of use cases, from IT and DevOps workflows to organization-wide credential management. It supports secure collaboration with granular access controls, and can be self-hosted to meet data sovereignty and compliance needs. Today, more than 50,000 organizations, including governments, startups and regulated companies, use Passbolt everyday to protect their most critical credentials while retaining transparency, control, and auditability.

The Onion framework – a new approach to Buildbot configuration

A framework that doesn’t make you cry.

Stay tuned to learn how you can get involved and contribute to the project!

If you don’t known what Buildbot is and what benefits it brings to MariaDB please check out this this quick introduction.

🤔 Just, why?

Over the years, the Buildbot project within MariaDB has undergone numerous transformations, constantly shaped by the requirements it needed to meet.

When I joined MariaDB in 2024, I was initially a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the codebase, a complexity that later turned out to stem mainly from the intertwining of implementation details with the simple core principles of BuildBot, such as builders, factories, builds, and workers.

The Queen and the Thousand-and-One Story

In the ancient tale of Scheherazade, it was not strength of arms or riches of gold that saved her life, but the power of storytelling. Each night, she told the king a tale so compelling that he postponed her execution — and by dawn after dawn, her stories not only spared her life but softened his heart and ultimately saved both her life and the kingdom itself.

So it is with us. Technology can be measured in benchmarks and features, yet what truly gives it meaning is its use — in businesses, in communities, in projects large and small.