Category: Stories

  • 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 […]

  • Case IBM Power 10: A further step for MariaDB Server

    IBM Power10 MariaDB Enterprise Server announcement

    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 […]

  • Why I keep choosing MariaDB

    Richard Bensley

    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 […]

  • Improving MariaDB support in open source projects

    A photorealistic image of a sea lion in the ocean, balancing and supporting many other animals on its back and head.

    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 […]

  • Looking for more migration guinea pigs

    Diving Sea Lion

    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 […]

  • Generative AI and MariaDB Server

    Sea Lion Gen AI

    “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 […]

  • 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 value of sponsoring MariaDB Foundation

    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. Intel wants to show commitment to MariaDB users getting the best experience built-in.
    2. The open source business model is shifting from funding through enterprise features and support to managed services. With this shift a lot of open source is becoming fully Free and therefore a Foundation type approach funded by sponsorship is essential so that the software can be independent of a particular managed service – but it only works if partners such as Intel commit to sponsor the development of this underlying software.
    3. With this new model Intel can collaborate with like minded people and business. Contributions are not just code – have a look at our blog about non-code contributions by Intel.