MariaDB at Percona Live Amsterdam 2026: Ecosystem, Plugins, Security, and Community

Percona Live returns to Europe on September 9–11, 2026, and MariaDB will be there!

The open source database community will gather at the Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre for three days of technical sessions, discussions and, probably just as importantly, conversations between the people building and running open source databases every day.

MariaDB will have a strong presence this year, with sessions from MariaDB Foundation and MariaDB engineers covering server extensibility, protocol security and the ecosystem surrounding MariaDB Server.

The MariaDB story at Percona Live goes beyond our own sessions: other members of the database community will share their experiences running MariaDB.

Extending MariaDB with Native Aggregate Plugins: Laying the Groundwork for HyperLogLog

MariaDB already allows developers to add new Pluggable Data Types and scalar Plugin Functions. One missing piece has been Pluggable Aggregate Functions operating on PDTs. That matters for functionality such as HyperLogLog, where an extension needs to aggregate values into a custom statistical sketch while preserving its native SQL type.

MDEV-40672 closes that architectural gap. Aggregate functions can now participate in MariaDB’s native aggregation infrastructure, including DISTINCT, window execution, prepared statements and Pluggable Data Types.

MariaDB already supports MariaDB_FUNCTION_PLUGIN, a mechanism for registering SQL functions that create regular server Item objects and can behave almost like built-in functions.

MariaDB: Improve Security with Two-Step Verification

In this primer I will show how to improve the security of your MariaDB installation by using two-step verification and how to use it from your Windows GUI client.

Let’s suppose you have your data in MariaDB, installed, say, on Ubuntu. And your users connect to it to run ad hoc queries, using some sort of a Windows GUI client. You don’t want them to write the access password on post-it notes or have it auto-entered by the client. And you don’t want anyone see the password when one of the salespersons connects to the mother ship from his laptop in the Internet café. …

Writing a MariaDB PAM Authentication Plugin

As you may know, since version 5.2.0 (released in April 2010) we support Pluggable Authentication. Using this feature one can implement an arbitrary user authentication and account management policy, completely replacing built-in MariaDB authentication with its username/password combination and mysql.user table.

Also, as you might have heard, Oracle has recently released a PAM authentication plugin for MySQL. Alas, this plugin will not run on MariaDB — although the MySQL implementation of pluggable authentication is based on ours, the API is incompatible. And, being closed source, this plugin cannot be fixed to run in MariaDB. And — I’m not making it up — this plugin does not support communication between the client and the server, so even with this plugin and all the power of PAM the only possible authentication method remains a simple username/password combination. …

The “MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development” book is finally published

If you want to know more about MySQL and MariaDB plugins read below. Our (Andrew Hutchings and mine) book MySQL 5.1 Plugins Development was just published by Packt. As far as I know it’s the first and the only book completely dedicated to MySQL Plugin API. It covers all existing in 5.1 plugin types, from Daemon to Storage Engines, and does not shun from explaining less known or poorly understood features of the plugin API. It describes newer plugin API extensions too – such as authentication plugins and recent CREATE TABLE extension. …