The Queen, the contributions and the wardrobe

I suppose not all of my readers have a first hand (or even second hand) experience of the girls-night-in. So let me shed some light on this sacred ritual of tea, sympathy and soul-baring conversation that zigzags from the ridiculous to the profound and back again in under 30 seconds.

There a few eternal mysteries that always seem to come up –
Like:
“Why do I have nothing to wear when my wardrobe is clearly full of clothes?”
And:
“Why does cat food smell weirdly delicious?”
(Okay, I do know the answer to that one: stop crash-dieting already!)
And then there’s this one:
“Why do pull requests feel like unexpected love letters?”

Yes, believe it or not, all the wonderful programmers in my life – and the brilliant code they write – are things we actually talk about during our girls’ night in! 

Why? Because my friends are the kind of people who can pivot from skincare serums to SQL in under a minute. Some of them work in tech, some just love a good story—and let’s face it, there’s nothing quite as juicy as a mysterious contributor swooping in from nowhere to fix a complex bug like it’s nothing. Instant legend status.

And honestly, we’re seeing that happen more and more in MariaDB lately. It’s been such a joy.

It Takes a Kingdom

What makes it even better? The way we’re collaborating across the board to support these contributions. Inside the MariaDB ecosystem, we work closely with our friends at MariaDB plc to ensure reviews are fast, thoughtful, and grounded in shared goals. It’s not just about checking boxes—it’s about building momentum together.

I’m happy to note that MariaDB plc actively and systematically contributes by giving the final reviews, on top of the initial Foundation review we do ourselves. The definitive, secondary review has to be done by a core developer, with commit rights and deep knowledge of the code area in question. These are usually (but not necessarily) employed by MariaDB plc.

I’m particularly happy to note that MariaDB plc’s VP Software Engineering has allocated time for reviews of external contributions, as part of every scrum cycle. To me, this shows a deep understanding of how Open Source works, and respect for what Open Source contributors expect.

And the results speak for themselves. Let me walk you through a couple of contributions, that have been blogged about.

A Few Royal Favorites

Take these two recent contributions by Libing Song from Alibaba Cloud:
🔗 Binlog Commit Optimization for Large Transactions
If you’ve ever felt the pain of big transactions clogging up performance, you’ll want to see this. It introduces a parallel commit logic that can significantly cut commit time for transactions with lots of rows. Less waiting, more throughput. We love to see it.
🔗  Rollback Prepared Transactions Asynchronously During Binlog Crash Recovery
It solves a sneaky edge case in crash recovery and does it with elegance—by decoupling the rollback path, it slashes recovery time. Critical work, beautifully done.

And for something a little more subtle (but no less important):
🔗  Always Use the Right UUID. This blog from our Foundation side presents work of the Google Summer of Code student  Stefano Petrilli  on UUIDs, defaults, and why UUID_SHORT() might not be your best friend. Spoiler alert: precision matters—and sometimes what you think is unique… isn’t.

🔗 mhnsw: support powerpc64 SIMD instructions This one comes from our friends in IBM —and it’s a gem. A clever performance fix that provides optimization of MariaDB Vector for Power10 architecture with a 30% speedup in microbenchmarks

These are the kinds of contributions that make MariaDB stronger—not just technically, but culturally. Because behind every patch is someone who cared enough to dig in, fix something, improve something, or challenge something. That’s the kind of community we want to keep building.

Come Build With Us

So whether you’re here to squash edge-case bugs, rethink defaults, or tackle massive transactions—pull up a chair (and maybe a cat), and let’s build together.

Ready to write your own love letter in the form of a pull request? Start here:
 First steps in contributing to MariaDB

Because trust me: the best kind of legacy is the one you help create.