Bringing Oracle’s Associative Arrays to MariaDB

One of the standout features of Oracle PL/SQL is the associative array — a versatile and efficient in-memory data structure that developers rely on for fast temporary lookups, streamlined batch processing, and dynamic report generation.

With the MariaDB 12.1 preview release, we’re excited to announce that associative arrays have landed in MariaDB as part of our growing set of Oracle compatibility features. This milestone, tracked under MDEV-34319, brings Oracle-style associative arrays into the MariaDB procedural language — complete with native type declarations, variable construction, and method support.

Let’s explore what’s included, what’s different, and how this feature was implemented from the ground up. 

Hetzner Becomes Gold Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation: Powering Our Build Infrastructure

We are delighted to welcome Hetzner as a Gold Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation!

Hetzner’s exceptional commitment to supporting our infrastructure has a direct and strategic impact on our operations. In particular, their sponsorship enables us to maintain and expand our Buildbot system — the backbone of testing and verifying MariaDB Server across platforms, architectures, and configurations. You can explore it live here: https://mariadb.org/mariadb-buildbot.

Building MariaDB, Bit by Bit

Buildbot is essential to the MariaDB Foundation’s mission.

Nextcloud joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor, strengthening the European open source backbone

We are proud to welcome Nextcloud GmbH to the MariaDB Foundation sponsor family as a Silver Sponsor. As the world’s most popular privacy-focused platform for secure file sharing, collaboration, and communication, Nextcloud stands as a pillar of digital sovereignty — a value that resonates deeply with MariaDB Foundation’s mission.

Built in Europe, trusted worldwide, Nextcloud is a champion of user-controlled data. By supporting MariaDB Foundation, Nextcloud affirms its commitment to a fully open, auditable, and sovereign technology stack—empowering users, businesses, and governments to stay in control of their data and avoid vendor lock-in.

MariaDB 12.1 preview available

We are pleased to announce the availability of a preview of the MariaDB 12.1 series. MariaDB 12.1 will be a rolling release.

MariaDB 12.1 introduces numerous new features, in particular

Performance improvements

  • Segmented key cache for Aria (MDEV-24)
  • MDL scalability improvements (MDEV-19749)
  • Parallel replication for galera replicas (MDEV-20065)
  • Buffered logging for audit plugin (MDEV-34680)
  • Faster vector distance calculations via extrapolation (MDEV-36205)

Compatibility features

  • caching_sha2_password plugin (MDEV-9804)
  • ( + ) for outer join syntax (MDEV-13817)
  • rpl_semi_sync_master_wait_for_slave_count (MDEV-18983)
  • Associative arrays: DECLARE TYPE ..

Crest Infosolutions LLC Joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor

Accelerating Digital Transformation Through Open Source Innovation

The MariaDB Foundation is proud to welcome Crest Infosolutions LLC as a Silver Sponsor, marking a significant step forward in fostering enterprise-grade open-source adoption. This partnership underscores Crest’s mission to deliver robust, secure, and scalable technologies that empower global organizations to thrive in the era of digital transformation.

Driving Open Source Adoption Across Enterprises

Crest Infosolutions brings over a decade of experience in delivering open-source excellence to its clients. Crest is already a long-standing partner of MariaDB plc and, by joining the MariaDB Foundation’s ecosystem of supporters, Crest reinforces its long-standing commitment to open technologies, developer collaboration, and sustainable innovation.

Why Switch.ch Chose MariaDB: A Swiss Case Study in Open Source, Digital Sovereignty, and Academic IT

At the MariaDB Foundation, we’re constantly engaging with users, partners, and collaborators to understand how MariaDB fits into their infrastructure—and what we can do better. A recent conversation between our Executive Chairman Kaj Arnö and Renato Furter from Switch.ch, Switzerland’s national research and education network, revealed valuable insights into open source adoption, digital sovereignty, and collaboration across European academia.

From MySQL to MariaDB: Why Switch Made the Move

Switch has been a MariaDB user for years. Their journey began with MySQL, like many institutions in academia. But when Oracle’s roadmap grew increasingly opaque and development around MySQL 5.7 stagnated, the Switch team made a practical decision: migrate to MariaDB.

New Silver Sponsor: Releem Boosts MariaDB Performance with Smarter Tuning and Optimization

We’re delighted to welcome Releem as the newest Silver Sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation!

Releem is a database performance management platform that helps teams ensure consistent and reliable database performance through continuous profiling, configuration tuning, and SQL query optimization. It brings together everything needed to streamline monitoring and performance improvements — all in one place.

With support for MariaDB, MySQL, Percona, and AWS Aurora, Releem works seamlessly across on-premise deployments (Linux, Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud-managed environments such as AWS RDS.

“We built Releem to simplify database performance management and eliminate the guesswork from tuning and optimization.

Can you do RAG with Full Text Search in MariaDB?

We continue our blog series on learning more about users of MariaDB. Searching LinkedIn for posts about MariaDB this morning we saw an impressive confident post about using MariaDB in a RAG solution named SemantiQ. We got curious about it and reached out to the author Lorenzo Cremonese to have a chat.

Lorenzo’s post on LinkedIn

Tell us about yourself Lorenzo! 

I’m an Italian studying in Spain. I began programming when I was 14, and I’m now 22. I’m a self-taught web developer since 3-4 years ago, and I’m now doing a two year University education in Spain focused on web development at the institute IES ENRIC VALOR, in Pego.