New Year’s Eve is when everyone takes stock of the year that has passed. At MariaDB Foundation, we’re no different.
The technical highlight: MariaDB Vector
It’s not hard to pick the technical MariaDB highlight of the year: It’s MariaDB Vector.
No big surprise there: The biggest new thing in IT is AI. AI is getting mainstream. Mainstream applications need databases. Databases need stability, performance, ease of use. And low cost.
The solution: MariaDB Server. It’s relational. It’s standard. It’s Open Source.
The business highlight: MariaDB plc on a solid footing
It’s equally easy to pick the business MariaDB highlight of the year: K1 taking over MariaDB plc.
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Continue reading “MariaDB highlights in 2024: Vectors, K1, and contributions”
As Chief Development Officer of the MariaDB Foundation, I’ve worked to ensure that our development efforts focus where they matter most. On this final day of 2024, I want to reflect on the significant technical achievements we’ve accomplished and the collaborative processes that made them possible.
Our work this year has been driven by the goal of building a stronger, more engaged MariaDB community. By sharing our progress and learnings, I hope to provide insights that may inspire and support other open-source projects.
Finally, I’ll outline the Foundation’s vision for 2025 and how we plan to bring it to life.
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We’re no mind readers, so from time to time, we like to do polls. Polls are quantitative in nature, so coming up with the right question is not enough – we need to do a bit of mind reading in coming up with the alternatives.
Quick development of text based RAG apps
Our hypothesis was that RAG is the cool thing to do with vector based databases, and specifically text based RAG. The conference talks we’ve given on MariaDB Vector (such as at the 24th SFSCON in Bozen, Südtirol, Italy on 8 Nov 2024) have stressed the value of easily being able to develop AI applications that answer user prompts based on knowledge in a specific text mass, not on the overall training data of an LLM.
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Continue reading “What do you expect from vector storage in databases?”
Good news: IBM is upgrading their Gold sponsorship to Platinum!
Our trinity: Adoption, Openness, Continuity
The three pillars of MariaDB Foundation are Adoption, Openness, and Continuity.
Adoption means that we work towards MariaDB Server to be used everywhere, where you need databases. We think Open Source RDBMSes are the way to go, and we want you to choose MariaDB Server.
Openness means that we work towards making it easy for everyone to contribute towards making MariaDB Server the best Open Source RDBMS. Be it code, documentation, training materials, bug reports, feature requests.
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We have the date, we have the place , we have the theme! So we ask you to save the date.
Date: Saturday 1 Feb 2025 (10:00-17:00)
Place: Brussels, SQ Lily-Rose, Avenue Arnaud Fraiteur 15-23, close to FOSDEM
Theme: Vectors, RAG and all things new in MariaDB Server
Registration: Please register here with Meetup
With the Open Source community convening for FOSDEM, we have noted Brussels is a great time to meet, chat, and share news and ideas.
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The day has come that you have been waiting for since the ChatGPT hype began: You can now build creative AI apps using your own data in MariaDB Server! By creating embeddings of your own data and storing them in your own MariaDB Server, you can develop RAG solutions where LLMs can efficiently execute prompts based on your own specific data as context.
Why RAG?
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) creates more accurate, fact-based GenAI answers based on data of your own choice, such as your own manuals, articles or other text corpses. RAG answers are more accurate and fact-based than general Large Language Models (LLM) without having to train or fine-tune a model.
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Continue reading “Try RAG with MariaDB Vector on your own MariaDB data!”
On November 6 2024 I presented a talk with the title: “The implementation of MariaDB parallel replication” at a local TeqHub meetup in Copenhagen.
In the talk I first presented how MariaDB replication works overall. I then described the central idea of optimistic parallel replication. Finally I described three details of the implementation: transaction scheduling; conflict detection; and efficient commit ordering. Here are the slides for the presentation.
I was very impressed by the level of the engagement of the audience. There were many questions that showed not only a deep interest in the subject, but also a deep understanding of the material I presented.
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Continue reading “Talk: The implementation of MariaDB parallel replication”
The MariaDB Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of MariaDB 11.7.1, the latest rolling release Release Candidate (RC), and MariaDB 11.6.2, the latest Generally Available (GA) rolling release.
A subset of the new features in MariaDB 11.7 include:
- Vectors
- Optimizer improvements (including the Charset Narrowing Optimization being on by default)
- Functions for generating version 4 and version 7 UUIDs
- The ROW data type as a return value in stored procedures
See the release notes and changelogs for details. …
Continue reading “MariaDB 11.6.2 and MariaDB 11.7.1 now available”