MariaDB Foundation at Oracle’s MySQL Contributor Summit: Ecosystems, Forks and Constructive Coexistence

Last week, Oracle invited MariaDB Foundation to give a presentation at Oracle’s MySQL Contributor Summit 2026. I had the opportunity to participate remotely and speak about MariaDB’s role within the broader MySQL ecosystem.

First of all, I would like to thank Heather VanCura, VP Community Engagement at Oracle, and Jason Wilcox, SVP Data Services at Oracle, for the invitation and for creating a space where these discussions could happen openly and constructively.

The presentation itself is available here on YouTube. At just over 17 minutes, it is reasonably compact viewing for anyone interested in the current state — and possible future direction — of the MySQL ecosystem.

When Oracle Drops the Ball: Why MariaDB is the Future of the MySQL World

The news has circulated quietly in industry corners, but the implications are far too significant to brush aside: Oracle seems to have ended the Open Source era of MySQL.

I am not a spokesperson for Oracle, yet the signs are unmistakable. Entire teams associated with MySQL at Oracle have been dissolved, spanning engineering, development and sales. On LinkedIn, I’ve received a wave of messages from former colleagues — both long-time MySQL veterans and those who joined Oracle years after MariaDB was founded in 2009.

The impression is clear: Oracle has made a rational business decision to pivot towards AI and cloud, where MySQL only matters insofar as it strengthens OCI and Heatwave.

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. 

Looking for more migration guinea pigs

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 – during our MariaDB Migration Workshop at our pre-FOSDEM event on Friday 2 Feb 2024.