The Power Of The Community!

Inspired by some recent LinkedIn posts, I decided to take the AI in my own hands and do some stats on the MariaDB and MySQL repositories.

This graph is what I’ve got.

Not only have MariaDB Server distinct contributors surpassed the distinct MySQL Server contributors count! The External MariaDB contributors alone did! *

This is how the Power Of the Community looks like!

And a reminder: Why contribute?

• You get to use a more functional, performant and error free MariaDB Server
• ⁠⁠You get a say in shaping the future of the MariaDB Server.
  • caveat: you’ll have to put your resources where your mouth is and contribute the changes that are important to you.
• ⁠⁠You avoid duplicate efforts and cooperate instead: our development process is public and anybody can follow and reference it. So no need to re-implement things over and over in isolation.
• ⁠⁠Once you contribute, the burden of maintaining the contribution will also be shared and will not be yours alone to bear.

My Method

I’ve asked the AI to vibe-code a shell script for me that I’ve then massaged a little. The result is as follows:

$cat gogo.sh 
#!/bin/bash
# =============================================
# Distinct committers to MariaDB/server per quarter
# Across ALL branches — 2025 and 2026
# =============================================

echo "Quarter,Distinct Committers,External Committers"
echo "------------------------------------------------"

CURRENT_DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

# You can change this if you want to go further in the future
MAX_YEAR=2026

for year in $(seq 2025 $MAX_YEAR); do
    for q in 1 2 3 4; do
        case $q in
            1) start="${year}-01-01" ; end="${year}-03-31" ;;
            2) start="${year}-04-01" ; end="${year}-06-30" ;;
            3) start="${year}-07-01" ; end="${year}-09-30" ;;
            4) start="${year}-10-01" ; end="${year}-12-31" ;;
        esac

        # Skip quarters that haven't started yet
        if [[ "$start" > "$CURRENT_DATE" ]]; then
            continue
        fi

        # Count distinct committers across ALL branches
        count=$(git log --all --since="$start" --until="$end" --format='%ae' | sort -u | wc -l)
        count_ext=$(git log --all --since="$start" --until="$end" --format='%ae' | sort -u | grep -v mariadb | wc -l)


        printf "Q%d %d,%d,%d\n" "$q" "$year" "$count" "$count_ext"
    done
done

I’ve run this atop of my local MariaDB/server tree clone. This has got me the numbers I needed for MariaDB.

Obviously I had to massage this a little more before running it on my MySQL server clone: I had to replace “mariadb” with “oracle.com”.

To my surprise I’ve received 0 for the external contributors to the MySQL repository. But then I’ve remembered why! So I had to discard that column.

And then I’ve poured the data back into the AI and asked it to produce a nice graph. And Voila!

Caveat: some of my MariaDB colleagues are pushing stuff using their personal emails. This somewhat skews the external count. Just know that The AI sees you 😉