This Month in MariaDB Foundation: September 2025

September was a month of big ideas, long-term thinking, and vibrant community energy for the MariaDB Foundation. Our Board of Directors met for what may well have been the most strategic session in Foundation history – and our community, in parallel, pushed the frontiers of innovation in AI, open source collaboration, and real-world adoption.

Let’s take a tour through the highlights — and yes, a few of these stories carried over into early October, simply because we had too much good news to contain in one month.

Strategic Vision: Strengthening the MariaDB Board

Our late-September Board of Directors meeting was all about looking ahead. We discussed how MariaDB Foundation can best serve a growing ecosystem while staying true to our open source mission.

A key milestone was described in From Vision to Action: Strengthening the MariaDB Foundation Board – Welcome, Frank Karlitschek!, where I introduced Frank Karlitschek as the newest member of our Board. Frank, founder of Nextcloud, brings invaluable experience in building open ecosystems and ensuring that strategic maturity and community values evolve hand-in-hand. This is part of a broader effort to bring industry leaders into our governance, aligning long-term vision with hands-on collaboration.

Innovation in Action: The MariaDB Python Hackathon in Bangalore

Community innovation was alive and buzzing this month in India, where developers joined forces for the MariaDB Python Hackathon: Building Momentum with Quality Idea Submissions.
Robert Silén highlighted the creative wave of proposals that flowed in, reflecting a growing interest in extending MariaDB’s usability through Python integration.

By the end of the month, I followed up in MariaDB Bangalore Hackathon: Ideation Phase Closing, celebrating both the quality of the submissions and the collaborative spirit of the community. This hackathon has proven that open source innovation thrives where passion and purpose meet.

Bridging Data and Intelligence: MariaDB and AI

Everyone’s talking about AI — often in buzzwords. But our MariaDB and AI: Building the Bridge That Really Matters post cuts through the hype.
The real challenge for organisations isn’t using AI for the sake of it; it’s connecting AI systems meaningfully to their own data. That’s where relational databases — and open ones in particular — play a critical role. MariaDB Server is uniquely positioned to make this bridge work: combining structured data with the context of large language models, all while staying open, transparent, and community-driven.

Picking Up the Ball: When Oracle Steps Back from MySQL

Oracle’s recent strategic shift has left the MySQL community wondering where to turn. In When Oracle Drops the Ball: Why MariaDB is the Future of the MySQL World, we offer a clear answer – based on the discussion we had in the Foundation Board.

While Oracle’s decisions may make sense from a shareholder perspective, they don’t serve the open source users who depend on MySQL. MariaDB, however, remains deeply compatible, yet richly enhanced — fifteen years of independent development have made it both a familiar and a forward-looking choice. As I argue in the blog entry, MariaDB isn’t a replacement — it’s the replacement.

Adoption Milestones: MariaDB Passes MySQL in WordPress Usage

A major reason to celebrate this September was MariaDB’s continued rise in real-world use.
Ian Gilfillan’s MariaDB passes MySQL in WordPress usage broke the big news: MariaDB now powers more WordPress sites than MySQL.

Robert Silén’s Riding the Waves – the MariaDB adoption index (covering data from up to September) shows that even positive trends have their ups and downs. After last month’s “onwards and upwards”, September saw a slight knock in overall numbers — mostly due to a dip in Docker image pulls, which carry significant weight in the index.

Still, there’s plenty of good news: metrics such as Debian “popcorn” installs, GitHub stars and README mentions, Wikipedia reads, and Reddit subscribers all rose. The team also made small but meaningful refinements to the index in response to community feedback — improving accuracy for StackExchange data, acknowledging Mastodon’s growth, and highlighting transparency as a cornerstone of MariaDB’s openness.

The Foundation is now considering adding new signals like brew install counts, Slack community size, and even engagement on open Reddit alternatives. And as AI tools reshape developer behaviour, the team is exploring how to capture those invisible interactions in future adoption metrics.

And if you prefer your database news told with storytelling flair, Anna Widenius’ The Queen and the Thousand-and-One Story captured the human side of our growing user base — celebrating every new deployment as part of a grand community narrative.

Engineering Transparency: Buildbot, Onion, and Openness

Technical openness continues to be at the heart of our culture.
Răzvan Vărzaru’s The Onion framework – a new approach to Buildbot configuration unveiled a layered and elegant approach to automating builds — a real step forward for maintainability.
Meanwhile, Sergei’s MariaDB 12.2 preview available offered a hands-on look at what’s coming next, giving developers early access and encouraging community testing.

And in the spirit of collaboration, Daniel Black’s XAMPP + Apache Friends need more Friends reminded us that open source progress depends on cross-project friendship — and that MariaDB is proud to play its part.

Community Growth: Welcoming New Silver Sponsors

The MariaDB ecosystem thrives on continuity as much as innovation. This month, we welcomed two new Silver Sponsors:
Mydbops Joins MariaDB Foundation as Silver Sponsor and
Passbolt becomes Silver Sponsor of MariaDB Foundation.

Both companies bring unique expertise and enthusiasm, reinforcing that the Foundation’s work is truly community-owned — sustained by those who use, contribute to, and believe in MariaDB.

Call to Action: Take the State of MariaDB 2025 Survey

We’re closing this month’s roundup with an invitation to you — the MariaDB community. As highlighted in Launching the State of MariaDB 2025 Survey, we’re gathering insights from users, contributors, and partners worldwide to better understand how MariaDB is used and where we should focus our collective efforts next year.

Your feedback shapes our roadmap — from feature priorities to community initiatives — and helps ensure that MariaDB remains not only open source, but open to you.

I would appreciate if you took ten minutes to make your voice heard:
👉 https://mariadb.typeform.com/survey-2025

Looking Ahead

From strategic renewal to grassroots innovation, September showed MariaDB Foundation at its best: open, forward-thinking, and full of momentum.
As we move into autumn, expect more conversations about AI, adoption, and collaboration — and stay tuned for October’s updates, where we’ll explore how these ideas are turning into tangible progress.