Category Archives: General
We live in a world where national interests intertwine with IT vendor interests. Interest is currently booming in “European Alternatives“. I’m happy to note that MariaDB Server is unaffected by considerations related to protectionism. In fact, choosing Open Source protects the user – an individual, an organisation, or a government – from protectionism itself.
Licensing prevails over national interests
Politicians come and go. National interests prevail a bit longer than individual politicians.
Companies also evolve, get acquired and merged across national borders.
Licensing of already released software remains constant across mergers and acquisitions.
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Exactly one month ago, I found myself stepping into the role of CEO at MariaDB Foundation. It was a bit like being handed the keys to a beloved old ship and being told, “Don’t worry, it mostly steers itself… unless there’s a storm. Or a kraken. Or a GitHub issue.”
As someone whose surname gives away a bit of context, it’s both an honor and a deeply personal journey to be entrusted with stewarding this next chapter. I used to say that I have done my bit for the project by adding “Maria” to “MariaDB”, but what do you know it turns out – there is a lot more out there for me to do!!!
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Continue reading “The Accidental Queen of the Database Dominion – Month one”
“The act of measuring disturbs the system and changes its state.” is a quote attributed to Werner Heisenberg. While I am uncertain about whether Heisenberg ever uttered those exact words, I am certain that the quote “What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed” is a management adage that gets a lot of negative publicity, deservedly so.
Metrics Not Considered Harmful
Yet, metrics can be helpful. MariaDB Foundation is far from overmeasuring pointy-haired-boss numbers, and in February, we made an attempt at systematically creating a meaningful metric that is easy to calculate.
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Continue reading “This month in MariaDB Foundation: Feb 2025”
Openness, Adoption, Continuity: You’ve heard me repeating our mantra like a broken record. Today is the next episode – and the theme du jour is about our Board Meetings, which we have minuted publicly on https://mariadb.org/bodminutes/ since October 2020.
At last Wednesday’s Board Meeting, we made quite a few important decisions – let me draw your attention to them in this separate blog entry.
Ex officio: Michael Widenius and Sergei Golubchik
First, we properly documented the special role of our founding Board members, Michael Widenius and Sergei Golubchik.
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Focus, focus, focus! That’s the mantra of any successful organisation. With great input from our Board, we’ve managed to condense our strategic planning for 2025 into six goals.
Refiguring the process – from descriptive to prescriptive
Our goal setting started from mapping out our activities 2024. I asked myself: “How can we describe what we do on one page?”. There were 38 activities – think “Scrum Epics” – in 6 areas.
Guess what? That’s too many. No Board member is interested in that level of detail. Oh well, I should have known.
Back to the drawing board.
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Continue reading “This month in MariaDB Foundation: Jan 2025”
New Year’s Eve is when everyone takes stock of the year that has passed. At MariaDB Foundation, we’re no different.
The technical highlight: MariaDB Vector
It’s not hard to pick the technical MariaDB highlight of the year: It’s MariaDB Vector.
No big surprise there: The biggest new thing in IT is AI. AI is getting mainstream. Mainstream applications need databases. Databases need stability, performance, ease of use. And low cost.
The solution: MariaDB Server. It’s relational. It’s standard. It’s Open Source.
The business highlight: MariaDB plc on a solid footing
It’s equally easy to pick the business MariaDB highlight of the year: K1 taking over MariaDB plc.
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Continue reading “MariaDB highlights in 2024: Vectors, K1, and contributions”
From near and from far, the same thing – in this case MariaDB plc – can look quite different. It’s all doom and gloom in an Infoworld article on MariaDB plc Can MariaDB’s enterprise business be saved? and its French translation in Le Monde Informatique L’activité entreprise de MariaDB bientôt liquidée ?
The turbulence seems exaggerated
True, our mission to provide Continuity is there to give users – including MariaDB plc customers – the confidence needed to continue using MariaDB Server under all circumstances. However, the turbulence portrayed in the press gives an unnecessarily bleak picture.
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Continue reading “MariaDB plc – looking forward to business as usual”
Our Sea Lion celebrates the end of a successful year, with a touch of Christmas spirit. We asked our AI Santa to create artwork that “evokes a sense of gratitude, optimism, and the magic of the holidays beneath the waves” – let me accompany the outcome with some reflections on the successful ending of the year.
Homework: What makes you feel good?
The trigger for the reflections was the last team Zoom meeting of the year, on Tuesday. I had asked everyone to prepare by doing a personal recap of what has happened the last three months (basically since our Staff meeting, (Un)conference, and MariaDB Server Fest early October).
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