The MariaDB Foundation Board has been meeting monthly since February and on Monday this week had the third meeting of the year. Here is an update on a couple of things from the meeting.

We’re happy to announce that Booking.com has renewed their support to the foundation. As a major corporate sponsor Booking.com has been offered a seat on the Foundation board. Booking.com nominated Eric Herman.  Eric has a history with MySQL dating from 2004 where he joined MySQL working on the server and tools.  In 2010, Eric joined Booking.com where he works on database scaling challenges and BigData. As a community member, he has contributed to the perl MySQL client driver, the perl interpreter, and other Free Software.  To represent community and industry interests in line with the Foundation mission, Eric Herman has joined the Board.

Best MariaDB ever hits the streets – MariaDB 10 innovations developed with Google, SkySQL & Fusion-IO

London, United Kingdom – 31 March 2014 – The MariaDB Foundation, an independent body which promotes the popular open source database MariaDB, today announced the much-anticipated general availability of MariaDB 10, providing today’s generation of application developers with enhanced performance and functionality.

Since its launch in 2009, MariaDB has built an active and vibrant open source community and has led the way in database innovation. In 2013, Wikimedia Foundation, the people behind Wikipedia, announced the migration of many of its production MySQL systems over to MariaDB and Google confirmed it aims to move its thousand-plus MySQL instances over to MariaDB technology.

Engineered by some of the world’s leading database experts, including MySQL founder, Michael …

Reposted from Monty Says.

I recently read some comments that we at the MariaDB Foundation have not been very open about what we are doing.

We are very sorry about this. The problem is not that we are secret about what we are doing, the problem is that not many of us working at the MariaDB Foundation are very active bloggers.

I will try to address this concern by starting a monthly blog about the MariaDB development that MariaDB Foundation employees are doing. This together with Simon Phipps’ state of the sea lion blog, which is published here, should hopefully give everyone a better idea of what we are doing.

At the MariaDB Foundation we are now 4 people …

Today we’re celebrating Percona’s 7th anniversary.  A lot has changed in these past 7 years – we have grown from a two-person outfit focused exclusively on consulting to a 100-person company with teammates in 22 different countries and 18 different states, now providing Support, Consulting, RemoteDBA, Server Development and Training services.

We also made our mark in open source software development, creating some of the most popular …

The Board of the MariaDB Foundation thought it would be good to provide an update — hopefully the first of a regular quarterly series — on how we’re progressing with the interim activities around constructing governance, identifying a new representative Board and structuring an engineering council.

• The MariaDB Foundation is now independent of any business interests. With the acquisition of Monty Program Ab by SkySQL Ab, there’s now a clear separation of functions. The Foundation is the home of community activity around MariaDB, dedicated to sustaining and delivering the MariaDB database on behalf of its community independently of the business interests of any member. We are acting as a US 501(c)(6) not-for-profit and intend to follow the advice we have received to formally register with the IRS at the start of 2014.
• Support from commercial backers is steadily flowing; you can see some of them listed on our new …

The MariaDB Foundation, stewards of the community-maintained open source MariaDB database that is sweeping the Internet, announced today the next steps towards a community-managed governance structure. With the appointment of a new, enlarged Board of Directors and a new interim chief executive, the MariaDB Foundation is now on track to a fully member-led governance in the second half of 2013.

The Board members are now Rasmus Johansson, Andrew Katz, Simon Phipps, Michael “Monty” Widenius, and Jeremy Zawodny. The first act of the new interim Board was to appoint Johansson as Chair and Phipps as Secretary and Chief Executive Officer.

The Board bring together a wealth of experience. Johansson is an experienced leader within the MariaDB developer community. Katz is a well-known expert in open source legal matters and has been acting as COO of the Foundation until now. Phipps brings experience of IBM and Sun Microsystems as well as …

I’ll be on a whistle-stop tour of California next week, including two presentations at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

On day one at 1:20pm I’ll be presenting CAP Theorem: Two out of three ain’t right, in which I will be challenging the popular ‘two out of three’ explanation of CAP Theorem, examining the evidence from a variety of experts, including Dr Eric Brewer.

Then on day three at 9:00am I’m very honoured to be providing a keynote presentation, The State of the MySQL Ecosystem.

Here’s an overview of the presentation:

It is now over three years since Oracle …

451 Research’s 2013 Database survey is now live at http://bit.ly/451db13 investigating the current use of database technologies, including MySQL, NoSQL and NewSQL, as well as traditional relation and non-relational databases.

The aim of this survey is to identify trends in database usage, as well as changing attitudes to MySQL following its acquisition by Oracle, and the competitive dynamic between MySQL and other databases, including NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.

There are just 15 questions to answer, spread over five pages, and the entire survey should take less than ten minutes to complete.

All individual responses are of course confidential. The results will be published as part of a major research report due during Q2.

The full …

I think MariaDB has had a great few weeks recently and the timeline of these events are important.

1. 27 November 2012 – WiredTree Adds MariaDB for Faster MySQL Database Performance (well worth reading their motivations to switch)
2. 29 November 2012 – Monty Program & SkySQL release the MariaDB Client Library for C & Java
3. 4 December 2012 – MariaDB Foundation is announced, see ZDNet coverage.
4. mid-December 2012 – Wikimedia Foundation starts migrating …

What is the value of a seed? 
When I discussed the MariaDB Foundation with friends and colleagues, many said I was exaggerating. My believe is that the Foundation is important for MySQL and for the future of the IT industry - services and applications. Many agreed with me that the Foundation is important for the MySQL ecosystem, but involving the global economy and the whole IT industry is a bit of a stretch.

Fact is, the World Wide Web would not be as it is today without MySQL. MySQL was part of the LAMP stack. It powered - and still powers - some of the most successful web sites in the world. Without LAMP, companies like Facebook, Twitter or Google would have been developed in a completely different way or they would have not been developed at all.

The importance of MySQL for the Internet is pretty clear for many of us. What is perhaps less clear is what is the current situation of MySQL and the …