Part of blog series on MariaDB BangPypers Hackathon, September – November 2025. Summary: Winners announced at BangPypers meetup | Blogs: Announcement at BangPypers Meetup | Quality Idea Submissions | Ideation phase closed | Impressive stats | Top ideas | How to Succeed | MariaDB Hackathon AMA slides | Winner interviews: Apache Airflow Integration #1 | Dagster Integration #2 | Query Optimizer for MariaDB Vector, Innovation #1 | Multimodal Embeddings for MariaDB Vector, Innovation #2 | Platform: mariadb-python.hackerearth.com | For more hackathons: MariaDB’s hackathon project page
The MariaDB Python Hackathon is gaining impressive traction! Following our AMA session (Ask Me Anything) on Friday, September 5th, we’ve seen even more encouraging engagement. Here’s where we stand and what we’re looking for as the idea submission phase continues until the end of September.
Strong Community Engagement
The response has been energizing, so far:
- Over 2,300 registrations from developers, from India and elsewhere
- 1,600+ teams formed and actively collaborating
- Steady stream of quality ideas being submitted
AMA webinar
Our AMA webinar on September 5th drew 164 unique viewers to a short summary of the hackathon and a productive Questions and Answers session.
Missed the session? You can watch the complete recording here or the slides here.
Encouraging Trends in Early Submissions
The initial ideas show participants understand our focus on advancing MariaDB’s ecosystem. We’re seeing strong interest in AI/vector applications, developer integrations, and practical showcases of MariaDB features—exactly what we hoped for.
However, we’d love to see a broader representation of MariaDB’s full feature set. While vector search and AI applications are exciting, MariaDB offers many powerful capabilities that deserve showcase projects.
Reminder: What We’re Seeking
As outlined in our hackathons page, the MariaDB Foundation organises hackathons to facilitate MariaDB adoption and encourage open source contributions. We’re looking for projects in two distinct tracks:
Integration Track: Make MariaDB Easy to Access and Use
We want MariaDB available and easy to use across all tools, languages, and environments:
- Python connectors and drivers – Improve or create new interfaces
- Framework integrations – Enable MariaDB in Django, FastAPI, Flask applications, etc
- AI/ML framework support – MCP, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Jupyter notebook enhancements, etc
- Developer tools – ORMs, migration tools, monitoring integrations
- Cloud platform enablement – Docker, Kubernetes, serverless environments
Our goal: Make MariaDB the natural choice for any Python project needing a database.
Your task: Integrate MariaDB in yet another environment
Innovation Track: Showcase MariaDB’s Diverse Capabilities
We want reference implementations that demonstrate MariaDB’s full potential:
Popular Focus Areas (so far):
- Vector Search for RAG/LLM applications (but we welcome even more!)
- Analytics with ColumnStore
- High Availability with Galera Cluster
A Few Underrepresented Opportunities: (Here’s your chance!)
- Temporal Tables – Time-travel queries and historical data analysis
- Spatial/GIS – Geographic data processing and mapping applications
- Advanced JSON – Modern document-style data handling
- Spider Storage Engine – Distributed database demonstrations
- Performance Features – Query optimization, indexing strategies
- Security Capabilities – Encryption, authentication, audit features
- Oracle Compatibility – Migration tools and compatibility showcases
- Backup/Recovery – Data protection and disaster recovery demos
- And other areas
Our goal: Create a comprehensive library of MariaDB feature demonstrations.
Your task: Create an elegant use case for one feature or feature set
What’s Next
Idea Submissions (September): The idea submission phase continues—there’s still time to propose projects, especially those showcasing underrepresented MariaDB features.
Rolling Evaluations: We’re accepting ideas to the development phase and providing feedback depending on the quality of the submission.
Development (October): Approved teams will build their solutions through the month-end.
Substantial Recognition: A USD $10,000 prize pool awaits winners (thank you MariaDB plc for sponsoring the prize money!). For an outstanding final submission, a possible paid trip to Finland to meet MariaDB founder Monty Widenius.
Join the Innovation
Registration remains open at mariadb-python.hackerearth.com. While AI applications are exciting, we encourage exploring MariaDB’s full feature spectrum. Whether you’re building temporal data applications, geographic systems, performance tools, or security demos, this is your opportunity to contribute to a major open source database.
Questions? Join our Discord channel linked on the hackathon site or contact us at hackathon@mariadb.org
