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.

Mydbops Joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor

We are delighted to announce that Mydbops has joined the MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor!

Mydbops is a trusted leader in open-source database consulting, empowering organizations worldwide to design, optimize, and scale their MySQL and MariaDB environments. Our dedication to operational excellence and community-driven innovation aligns seamlessly with the MariaDB Foundation’s mission to promote openness, adoption, and continuous advancement of MariaDB.

This partnership reinforces the importance of service providers and consultants in the MariaDB ecosystem and marks another step forward in our commitment to open collaboration.

Thank you, Mydbops, for your support and trust.

Diegesis becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation to champion digital transformation in an open-source environment

Diegesis, the London-based business and technology consultancy, is pleased to announce that it has joined the non-profit MariaDB Foundation as a Silver Sponsor to ensure one of the world’s most popular database servers – that also powers Wikipedia – remains free of charge and accessible to all.  The MariaDB Server is a general-purpose open-source Relational Database Management System (DBMS) that relies solely on funding from benefactors like Diegesis.  Today’s announcement also strengthens Diegesis’ commitment to enabling organisations in the public and private sector to modernise and migrate their legacy systems to the latest technology frameworks without vendor lock-in, limits or licensing traps.