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.

MariaDB & IONOS: Improving performance for hosting

The MariaDB Foundation values our partnerships with our sponsors. Our partnership with IONOS allows us to get insight into how MariaDB Server is used and the direction it should take. As well as generally improving MariaDB Server in many different ways.

IONOS story

At CloudFest 2023, one of the first meetings we had was with Stefan Erkeling from IONOS. It was a very good meeting and it was great to see how much IONOS values our partnership. Stefan indicated in the meeting that there was a performance issue they were hitting and some advice was needed.

The value of sponsoring MariaDB Foundation

Why does Intel sponsor the MariaDB Foundation? I had the opportunity to interview Steve Shaw, Principal Engineer at Intel and a Board Member at MariaDB Foundation.

I strongly urge you to look at the 09:34 long video on YouTube – Steve is well articulated and a pleasure to listen to. Still, here is a glimpse of what he goes into:

  1. MariaDB Server is incredibly popular software. Just the Docker image alone has had more than a billion downloads. The majority of MariaDB installations run on Intel servers and developers coding on Intel laptops and desktops.

Sauron says to Dumbledore and Merlin…

This sounds like a lame cross-genre joke, but it is not. It is a lame cross-genre math problem. I have to admit, it didn’t have those names when I read about it, but I wanted to make it a bit more epic. So,

Sauron says to Dumbledore and Merlin, finally I have captured you both. Now I shall select two numbers, greater than one, less than a hundred. Dumbledore shall know their product and Merlin shall know their sum. If you, fools, will be able to tell me the numbers I have chosen, I shall let you free.

CloudFest Reflections by mariadb.org

CloudFest in Germany, what an event! Thousands of representatives of cloud service providers and the surrounding ecosystem. Although MariaDB Server seems to be the database of choice in this realm, 2023 was the first year when we were more extensively present for CloudFest.

Check out our 11:19 long video with Monty’s and my reflections!

Chat with our founder Monty, Michael Widenius

Related posts:

Creating the MariaDB Health Check plugin for WordPress