Celebrating 15 years of innovation

We have been in festive mode this week, celebrating fifteen years of MariaDB. You may have seen our very own Ian Gilfillan’s blog MariaDB Server turns fifteen!, or the blog of Alejandro Duarte of MariaDB plc, MariaDB Server Turns 15! Here Are 15 Reasons Why Developers and DBAs Love It.

Technical overview by the creator of MariaDB Server

Now, MariaDB Server’s creator Michael »Monty« Widenius has chimed in, with a lot of technical detail. Hardly anybody is better equipped to create this technical overview, Celebrating 15 years of MariaDB.

MariaDB Foundation assisting multiple vendors

I recently helped two of our sponsors simultaneously, DBS Bank and MariaDB Plc, with a recent issue they were experiencing. This actually helped us add support for an extra cloud vendor. But before I tell the story, I first need to give a bit of background.

S3 Engine History

Back in 2019, we added the S3 engine to MariaDB Server. “S3” stands for “Simple Storage Service”, it was developed by Amazon, and it is pretty much the standard for storing objects (typically files) in the cloud. Almost every cloud vendor has their own object storage with an S3-compatible REST API.

Amazon contributes to MariaDB Vector

MariaDB Vector preview was recently released, bringing much awaited Vector Search functionality to MariaDB Server. One of the major open source contributors to MariaDB Vector has been Amazon. To share the excitement and get an inside view about what it’s like to contribute to MariaDB Server, I had a chat with software engineer Hugo Wen on the Amazon RDS team

Hugo’s contributions to MariaDB Vector

Hugo Wen’s work on vector similarity search in MariaDB and MySQL started when Amazon’s leadership identified Vector Search functionality as a critical addition and decided to invest Amazon RDS team’s time on contributing to MariaDB Vector.

Case IBM Power 10: A further step for MariaDB Server

Good news: This week, two of MariaDB Foundation’s sponsors – IBM and MariaDB plc – made an announcement that we believe to be good for both parties, as well as for the MariaDB Server user base. We humbly (and boldly) believe that this was enabled by MariaDB Foundation’s living by its core values of Adoption, Openness, and Continuity. 

Let me explain why, and start with the announcement itself:

MariaDB Enterprise Server Launches on IBM Power 10

MariaDB plc’s offering to its customers, MariaDB Enterprise Server, was launched for IBM Power 10. This was supported by a blog post from MariaDB plc (MariaDB Enterprise Server Launches on IBM Power10) and another by IBM (Announcing support for MariaDB Enterprise Server on IBM Power). 

Why I keep choosing MariaDB

Users of open source software don’t always share their stories, simply because they are satisfied. That’s why we were delighted to accept an offer from database expert Richard Bensley to share why he has repeatedly used MariaDB over the years. 

I had a chat with Richard and learnt that he has seen MariaDB as a user, customer, and even an employee of MariaDB. Despite experimenting with other solutions, new and old, his passion for MariaDB and the people behind hasn’t faltered. 

Richard has been using MariaDB in large scale production since 2012 for financial platforms, CRMs and e-commerce for regional and international use.

Improving MariaDB support in open source projects

As part of MariaDB’s efforts in Adoption, we have been working on support of MariaDB in open source projects. 

The open source projects we have been looking at range from well known, ready to use projects like WordPress or MediaWiki (that Wikipedia runs on), to under-the-hood solutions like ORMs that connect software with databases for countless other open source and private projects.

MariaDB is the de facto standard that many projects and users are running. As MariaDB diverges, matures and develops on its own path from MySQL, especially in later versions, it’s not enough to shrug off compatibility questions with “MariaDB is a drop-in MySQL replacement – everybody knows that”.

Looking for more migration guinea pigs

Remember our open letter, Looking for MySQL 5.7 or 8.0 guinea pigs?

We caught a nice German guinea pig!

We caught a nice guinea pig, a German one, from Hannover. They are currently using MySQL 5.7 (as was our prime wish), and they will be doing a live migration to MariaDB 10.11. They have 1.000.000.000 queries a day, their database size is 412 GB, and our goal is to the migration of the production data in less than five minutes – during our MariaDB Migration Workshop at our pre-FOSDEM event on Friday 2 Feb 2024.

Generative AI and MariaDB Server

“Generative AI is a can of worms that has to be opened”. That was the laconic comment from a senior industry influencer, when I shared MariaDB Foundation’s plans for successively making MariaDB Server a platform for AI solutions. The statement combines the opportunity with the inevitability, the complexity with the need for stepwise refinement.

Late to the game?

Are we late to the game? I believe not. I believe this is the right timing. Open Source isn’t a pioneer when it comes to basic research or even early product development.