A Year in Review: Notable External Contributions to MariaDB Server in 2025

It’s the time of the year to look back and reflect. In line with the holiday spirit, we’d like to highlight some of the MariaDB Server contributions from 2025 that the team found particularly inspiring and interesting, and to say thank you to everyone who submitted them.

At the end of the post, we invite the community to help us recognise the most impactful external contributions of the year.

MDEV-36737 Research and Estimation for Adapting VIDEX to MariaDB: thank you, Haibo Yang (YoungHypo) and Rong Kang (kr11) from ByteDance for this very interesting contribution. Autonomous self-optimization is a very hot topic right now in all services and particularly in databases. This functionality is a very elegant way to achieve some of that with the MariaDB server.
MDEV-10862 Stored procedures: default values for parameters (optional parameters), MDEV-34317 Implement RECORD type and MDEV-34319 DECLARE TYPE .. TABLE OF .. INDEX BY in stored routines: thank you, Iqbalbin Hassan (iqbal-rsec) from Rakuten for these usability enhancements of the SQL stored programs language. Having these modern tools into the language helps Developers, Developers, Developers! to breach the digital divide and start coding logic for the MariaDB server.
MDEV-36184 To optimise dot_product in Power9 and Power10 architecture and MDEV-37107 Optimise dot_product by loop-unrolling by a factor of 4: thank you, Manjul Mohan (mikejuliet13) from IBM for your work on optimizing the MariaDB server code for the IBM Power architecture! Writing code in a way that that allows taking advantage of all hardware features and optimizations is not at all trivial.
MDEV-33834 Extend audit plugin to include tls_version and tls_version_length variables and MDEV-12182 Add client tcp port to audit plugin logs: thank you, keeper and Hayden Heales (HashimSyedUBC) from Amazon for adding this extra information to the MariaDB audit log! In today’s world one cannot overestimate the importance of secure computing! Being able to answer who did what when is a very important aspect of information security. Adding more data to support this is always a good idea.
MDEV-21376 mysqldump should support wildcards: thank you, Ivan Bochkov (ivan-bochkov) for making dumping data easier. Backing up is a very important aspect of security too. And logical dumps are a popular way to do backups. Making them more convenient to use is contributing to better security overall.
MDEV-34954 Add JSON flag for mysqldumpslow.sh: thank you, Ahmed Hani (HNOONa-0) for this enhancement of a tool around one of the most popular ways to analyze the MariaDB server performance. Having a machine readable output allows creating even more advanced tooling to support smooth operation of the server.
MDEV-35876 speedup collation/charset lookup: thank you, Jitesh Chawla (jiteshchawla1511) for making the MariaDB server run faster in certain workloads. Finding collations by name is a part of such critical paths as logging in, setting system variables etc.
MDEV-23818 implement mysql option –script-dir: thank you, Hossam Hassan (Hossamfc9) for this nice usability enhancement to the MariaDB client tool. Organizing SQL scripts can be hard if you have too many of them.

At last, I’d like to mention a pull request that was created on April the 1st, 2025, Add amen Statement for Committing Transactions! Thank you, sigmasternchen for keeping the joyful and playful hacking spirit alive! (This contribution is not included in the poll but deserved a special mention.)

Note that this is by no means a complete list! Nor are the contributions only to the MariaDB server itself! We will follow up with similar posts about contributions to other parts of the code base too.

Vote for the Top External Contributor of 2025

This poll recognizes notable external contributions to MariaDB Server in 2025.
Voting is split into two categories to ensure fairness: