About MariaDB Server - MariaDB.org

MariaDB Server is one of the most popular database servers in the world. It’s made by the original developers of MySQL and guaranteed to stay open source. Notable users include Wikipedia, WordPress.com and Google.

MariaDB turns data into structured information in a wide array of applications, ranging from banking to websites. Originally designed as enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL, MariaDB is used because it is fast, scalable and robust, with a rich ecosystem of storage engines, plugins and many other tools make it very versatile for a wide variety of use cases.

MariaDB is developed as open source software and as a relational database it provides an SQL interface for accessing data. The latest versions of MariaDB also include GIS and JSON features.

More information can be found in the MariaDB Knowledge Base, for example:

MariaDB vs. MySQL – Features
MariaDB vs. MySQL – Compatibility
MariaDB Success Stories

There is also a good Wikipedia article about MariaDB and the MySQL history.

MariaDB Server will remain Free and Open Source Software licensed under GPLv2, independent of any commercial entities.

MariaDB in brief

About MariaDB Foundation

The cornerstones of the MariaDB Foundation mission are Openness, Adoption, and Continuity.

We ensure the MariaDB Server code base remains open for usage and contributions on technical merits.
We strive to increase adoption by users and across use cases, platforms and means of deployment.
We provide continuity to the MariaDB Server ecosystem, independent of any commercial entities.

The MariaDB Foundation is the global contact point for collaboration on MariaDB Server.

The Foundation is non-profit incorporated in Delaware, USA. and is funded by corporate and individual sponsors.

The Foundation’s staff supports MariaDB Server by:

Encouraging adoption, contribution and distribution of MariaDB Server and related open source software.
Helping new contributors understand the source code and lowering the barrier for new participants.
Participating in the design of new features, ensuring the code quality and maintainability of the codebase while the number of contributors is growing.
Making sure documentation keeps up with the development of new features.
Porting and packaging MariaDB to different platforms and operating systems to keep it as widely available as possible.
Speaking at events and driving adoption.

Details about the Foundation’s principles, operation and the board of directors are available on the Governance page. More information regarding board meeting minutes can be found here.

While the Foundation’s staff do work on the code base and develop MariaDB to some extent, the mission of the Foundation is not to develop MariaDB as much as possible, but to empower a large as possible community to be successful in collaborative MariaDB development.

Benefactors

Board

Below is a list of current MariaDB Foundation board members. See Governance for more details on how MariaDB Foundation is governed.

Chairman of the Board

Eric Herman
Chairman of the MariaDB Foundation Board, Lead Codebase Steward at the Foundation for Public Code

Board Members

Espen Håkonsen
CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications

Max Mether
VP, Server Product Management, MariaDB Corporation

Michael “Monty” Widenius
Founder of MariaDB and MySQL

Qinglin Zhang
Database kernel engineer at Tencent

Steve Shaw
Open source database lead at Intel

Todd Boyd
Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM

Xiang Peng
Director, RDS Open Source Databases at Alibaba Cloud

Community Representative

Barry Abrahamson
CTO Automattic

Sergei Golubchik
Chief Architect MariaDB at MariaDB Corporation

Eric Herman

Chairman of the MariaDB Foundation Board, Foundation for Public Code

Eric Herman, former Principal Developer of Booking.com, and currently at the Foundation for Public Code, joined the MariaDB Foundation board of directors in May 2015, and was elected chair in November 2016. Prior to Booking.com, Eric worked for MySQL and Sun from 2004 through 2009. Eric remains an active member and contributor to the MariaDB/MySQL ecosystem, as well as contributing to other Free Software projects. For fun, Eric enjoys designing electronics, embedded programming, campfire cooking, brewing beer, and collaborating on all sorts of do-it-yourself projects.

Barry Abrahamson

Community Representative, Systems Wrangler at Automattic

Barry started using MySQL v3.23 in 2003 while working at Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas. Since 2006 Barry has served as Chief Systems Wrangler at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and many other well known web services such as Akismet and Gravatar. He also serves as the infrastructure lead for the open source WordPress.org software project. Barry currently lives in Houston, Texas with his family and enjoys the outdoors, eating BBQ, building LEGO, and tinkering with home automation in his free time.

Espen Håkonsen
CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications

Espen has been CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications since September 2013, and a MariaDB board member since 2015.

Max Mether
VP, Server Product Management, MariaDB Corporation

Max Mether is a co-founder of MariaDB Corporation. He is currently head of server product management where he leads the development efforts on MariaDB Server and surrounding technologies. Prior to his current role, Max built the Professional Services team at MariaDB from the ground up. Max began his career consulting and training for companies such as MySQL and Sun Microsystems. He earned his Masters of Science (Eng) in physics and math from Helsinki University of Technology. A native of Finland, and by way of Paris, France, Max now resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Michael “Monty” Widenius
Founder of MariaDB and MySQL

The “spiritual father” of MariaDB, one of the original developers of MySQL, and a renowned advocate for the open source software movement. In addition to serving as CTO for the MariaDB Corporation, he is also a Founder and a board member of the MariaDB Foundation. He was a founder at SkySQL, and the CTO of MySQL AB until its sale to Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Monty was also the founder of TCX DataKonsult AB, a Swedish data warehousing company. He is the co-author of the “MySQL Reference Manual” and was named Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003. In 2015, Monty was selected as one of the 100 most influential people in the Finnish IT market. Monty studied at Helsinki University of Technology and lives in Finland.

Qinglin Zhang
Tencent

Qinglin Zhang is a database kernel engineer, focusing on MariaDB and MySQL kernel development and related architecture work, serving Tencent’s self-developed product business and Tencent cloud business.

Sergei Golubchik
Developer Representative, Chief Architect MariaDB at MariaDB Corporation

Sergei was a MySQL developer since 1998. From 1999 to 2009 in MySQL AB, Sun, then in Monty Program AB and MariaDB Corporation on MariaDB. During these years he has touched almost every part of the server. To list a few projects – fulltext search, XA, HANDLER, precision math library, parallel repair and bulk inserts in MyISAM, indexes in MERGE. Sergei is a primary architect of the plugin API and an author of the “MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development” book.

Steve Shaw
Intel

Steve Shaw is the open source database lead for Intel and lead developer of the open source database benchmarking tool HammerDB. With more than 20 years experience in commercial database he is also the author of 2 books on Oracle on Linux. He now focuses exclusively on ensuring that open source relational database runs best on Intel platforms.

Todd Boyd
IBM

Todd Boyd has worked for IBM for over 30 years in various capacities; he started in ZSeries I/O performance before moving to the Power Systems performance team. He has lead the Competitive Analysis Technical Team (CATT) for the last 15 years which projects the performance capabilities of competitive systems and solutions. He now works on the Cognitive Systems offering team in conjunction with the performance and the ISV teams to drive the Power portfolio offerings. In this role he deals with many ISV’s and acts as the IBM representative on the MariaDB Foundation Board.

Xiang Peng
Director, RDS Open Source Databases at Alibaba Cloud

Team

Alexander Morozov
Media Production Team

Andreia Hendea
Web developer

Anel Husaković
Software developer

Anna Widenius
Chief of staff

Daniel Black
Chief innovation officer

Faustin Lammler
System and network engineer

Ian Gilfillan
Principal technical writer: documentation

Kaj Arnö
CEO

Michael (Monty) Widenius
Founder & CTO

Vicențiu Ciorbaru
Chief Development Officer

Vlad Bogolin
Software developer

Alexander Morozov
Media Production Team

Email: morozov@mariadb.org

Andreia Hendea
Web Developer

Email: andreia@mariadb.org
Zulip: Andreia Hendea

Anel Husaković
Software Developer

Anel holds a Master’s degree from the Electrical Faculty in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Department of Automatic Control and Electronics. He is studying a Ph.D. at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, at the University of Zagreb, Croatia.

He is deeply interested in open source software because he strongly believes that knowledge is the only asset that is increased when it is shared.

Anel’s work for the MariaDB Foundation focuses on fixing bugs, helping new contributors and collaborating with the community, all while learning new things.

On a personal note, Anel is looking to understand how all things work, so occasionally he does research and works on embedded systems. Most of his free time is spent with family and friends.

Email: anel@mariadb.org
Zulip: Anel Husakovic
IRC: channel #maria on freenode username an3l.

Anna Widenius
Cheer Leader and Cat Herder

Email: anna@mariadb.org
Zulip: Anna Widenius

Daniel Black
Chief Innovation Officer

After a reasonable amount of time doing development and IT security work, Daniel landed a DBA Consultant job and loved it.

After writing a few too many bug fixes without a client to bill them to, he joined IBM to make MariaDB and MySQL scale on IBM POWER.

The love for the community brought him to MariaDB Foundation where he embraces the innovation of contributors and users to make MariaDB better for everyone.

Email: daniel@mariadb.org
Zulip: Daniel Black

Faustin Lammler
System and network engineer

Faustin is a French System and Network engineer; his skills go from BGP to Ansible passing by LaTeX. Debian GNU/Linux is his favorite OS.

Free software and open standard/format enthusiast, Faustin believes it is important that users are encouraged and able to share their knowledge freely.

At the MariaDB Foundation Faustin works on infrastructure, packaging, installation and upgrade issues for Debian GNU/Linux based distributions.

Email: faustin@mariadb.org
Zulip: Faustin Lammler

Ian Gilfillan
Principal technical writer: documentation

Ian Gilfillan works part-time for the MariaDB Foundation, mostly working on the MariaDB documentation.

He has majors in IT as well as English and Philosophy, developed and taught various web and database programming courses, and wrote the first online grocery store in South Africa in the 90s.

He was lead developer for South Africa’s largest media company, and wrote the book Mastering MySQL 4 in 2002 based on his experiences there. He wrote regular columns on MySQL and web programming in the 2000s, before founding and developing an online organic food co-operative in 2005.

He has also been an active Wikimedian since 2003, and is currently on the Wikimedia South Africa board.

Email: ian@mariadb.org
Zulip: Ian Gilfillan

Kaj Arnö
CEO

Kaj is a software industry generalist, having served as VP Professional Services, VP Engineering, CIO and VP Community Relations of MySQL AB prior to the acquisition by Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Kaj served as MySQL Ambassador to Sun and Sun VP of Database Community. Board member at Footbalance Systems Oy (Helsinki, Finland). Past founder, CEO and 14 year main entrepreneur of Polycon Ab (Finland).

Kaj is a co-founder of MariaDB Corporation Ab, and served on its Executive Team in several positions, most recently Chief Evangelist.

Kaj lives and works in Munich, Germany, and during summer often in Nagu, Finland. He is a citizen of both countries. Kaj holds a M.Sc. (Eng.) from Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) and an MBA from Hanken School of Economics.

Programming-wise, Kaj started out on the TI-58 in the 1970s, followed by Basic and a bit of assembler on the ABC-80 and ABC-800, together with Michael “Monty” Widenius. Kaj took fondness to APL on mainframes, before settling on the 4GL Focus as the technical basis for his first company Polycon. After a Visual Basic period, a Delphi period and a brief PHP period, Kaj moved out of programming into management, only to realise in 2011 that Python is good for his mental well-being. His venture into geodata with Python even left some superficial traces on Github.

Licensing-wise, Kaj contributed to GPLv3 as co-chair of the industry Committee B, advising the FSF on GPLv3 in 2006-07, observing how Eben Moglen led the process towards industry consensus. In 2014, Kaj formalised the Business Source License BSLv1 with its originator Michael Widenius, and made it more mainstream into BSLv1.1 with the help of Bruce Perens and Heather Meeker.

Language-wise, Kaj is a native Swedish speaker. He also speaks German, English, Finnish and French, and has presented in a number of other languages, including Russian, Japanese, Chinese, and Estonian, mostly understanding what he is saying.

Kaj joined MariaDB Foundation as CEO on 1 February 2019.

Email: kaj@mariadb.org
Zulip: Kaj Arnö

Vicențiu Ciorbaru
Senior software developer, team lead

Vicențiu-Marian Ciorbaru is based in Romania, Bucharest. Having had to fix problems in many places, ranging from query-optimiser, authentication, replication, packaging, as well as platform specific problems, Vicențiu has had experience with many parts of the codebase. He is also a fast learner and can jump on any problem that surfaces. Past projects include Roles, Window Functions, Custom Aggregate Functions.

Vicențiu’s passions include teaching and making things work, both in the software world as well as in the hardware world. He used to teach Algorithm Design at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest and now mentors students in programming, both locally as well as internationally, in programs such as Google Summer of Code. He enjoys speaking at conferences and you will probably find him at one of the Open Source Events around the world. He also holds a masters degree in Artificial Intelligence and will gladly enjoy discussing recent developments.

Email: vicentiu@mariadb.org
Zulip: Vicențiu Ciorbaru

Vlad Bogolin
Software developer

Email: vlad@mariadb.org
Zulip: Vlad Bogolin

Service providers

MariaDB Server is open source software and free to use as stated in the General Public License. The MariaDB Foundation is all about ensuring continuity and open collaboration – we do not provide any support or guarantees regarding the use of MariaDB to individual users. For anybody using MariaDB in a commercial setting we strongly recommend getting commercial products and services from any of the companies listed below.

MariaDB Foundation members

MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB Corporation has been a sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation since 2013.

If you want to have your company listed here, please become a member of the MariaDB Foundation.

Other service providers

Percona Inc.

With more than 3,000 customers worldwide, Percona is the only company that delivers enterprise-class solutions for MySQL®, MariaDB®, MongoDB®, and PostgreSQL across traditional and cloud-based platforms. Our unbiased open source database experts enable you to achieve success with modern database deployments by helping you navigate complexity and mitigate risks using best-of-breed open source solutions to avoid vendor lock-in.

Percona is a bronze sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation.

FromDual

FromDual is specialised in MariaDB and MariaDB Galera Cluster providing professional services as support including 24×7 SLA, remote-DBA, MariaDB training and consulting.

Open Query | Catalyst (Australia/New Zealand)

Open Query are an Australian based company with specific expertise in MySQL and MariaDB. Our services include consulting, scalable architecture, proactive remote DBA, system administration, vendor neutral managed services with optional emergency support, training, and security and code reviews. Peace of mind for your MariaDB infrastructure providing tuning, training services and more. openquery.com.au

In 2018, Open Query was acquired by Catalyst IT Australia Pty Limited, enabling an even broader range of services.

Pythian

Pythian is a global IT services company. We design, implement, and manage systems that directly contribute to revenue and business success. Our highly skilled technical teams work as an integrated extension of our clients’ organizations to deliver continuous transformation and uninterrupted operational excellence using our expertise in advanced analytics, big data, cloud, databases, DevOps and infrastructure management.

Pythian is vendor neutral and a trusted advisor for your full-stack environment. We provide 24×7 managed service support, on-site or remote for MySQL-compatible database environments, including MariaDB.

Policies

Certificate of Incorporation

The Certificate of Incorporation of MariaDB Foundation is available at https://mariadb.org/certificate.

By-laws

The By-laws of MariaDB Foundation are available at https://mariadb.org/bylaws.

Governance

The MariaDB Foundation uses technical and legal means to guarantee the technology used by the MariaDB community will continue to be open in every sense.

Individual board meeting minutes starting Oct 2020 can be found here and the finances here.

No single person or company is able to dictate priorities or code to the community.

Non-profit foundation

The MariaDB Foundation is non-stock not-for-profit and incorporated in Delaware, USA. It is aiming at US 501(c)(3) status.

Board of directors

The foundation is legally controlled by the board. The board makes decisions on how the foundation can best serve the MariaDB community. The board does not make technical decisions.

The current Board of Directors is:

Eric Herman (Chairman of the Board), Lead Codebase Steward at the Foundation for Public Code
Barry Abrahamson (Community Representative), Systems Wrangler at Automattic
Espen Håkonsen, CIO of Visma and Managing Director of Visma IT & Communications
Fangxin Lou, RDS Kernel Developer Team Leader at Alibaba Cloud
Max Mether, VP, Server Product Management, MariaDB Corporation
Michael “Monty” Widenius, Founder of MariaDB and MySQL
Qinglin Zhang, Tencent
Sergei Golubchik, (Developer Representative), Chief Architect MariaDB at MariaDB Corporation
Sudhakar Sannakkayala, GM for OSS databases and database migrations in Microsoft Azure
Todd Boyd, IBM

Technical decisions

Decisions regarding contributions are made by the contributors themselves, and if a general consensus is required for a particular technical decision, the topic is discussed openly on the MariaDB mailing lists and other transparent online means until a clear majority is reached among the developers.

Principles

We’re committed to excellence:

in the code we produce.
in our relations with our employees.
in our relations with our developer and user communities.
in the company we keep.

This being the case:

We are subscribing to the Ubuntu code of conduct for how we work in the open source environment. We expect from others what we expect from ourselves.
All code we produce will by default be GPL (e.g. MariaDB) or BSD-new (e.g. all-purpose libraries).
Any patches given to us for our project’s source trees should be licensed under the MariaDB contributor agreement (MCA), BSD-new license, or public domain (in that order of preference). We require this to be sure we can use the code freely in MariaDB and other products. We also want to be able to contribute the code forward to other open source projects.
- Log of MariaDB Contributions contains an audit trail of patches included into MariaDB and whether they were contributed under the MCA or BSD.

Maintenance policy

The latest long-term maintenance release, 10.6, was announced as stable in July 2021 and will be maintained until at least July 2026. The latest short-term maintenance release, 10.9, was announced RC in May 2022, and will be maintained until at least May 2023. The next development version, 10.10, is likely to be announced as stable later in 2022.

A new long-term support MariaDB Server version will be announced for General Availability approximately once every two years. A new short-term support MariaDB Server version will be announced approximately quarterly. The MariaDB Foundation guarantees that every long-term maintenance release will be maintained for at least 5 years, and every short-term maintenance release for at least one year. The MariaDB Foundation prioritizes security fixes and major bug fixes that affect a large number of users, and other fixes that are important to the members and sponsors of the foundation. Please become a sponsor or donor to support our work.

MariaDB general release maintenance periods

Major and Minor Version	Stable (GA) Date	End-of-life
5.1	1 Feb 2010	1 Feb 2015
5.2	10 Nov 2010	10 Nov 2015
5.3	29 Feb 2012	1 Mar 2017
5.5	11 Apr 2012	11 Apr 2020
10.0	31 Mar 2014	31 Mar 2019
10.1	17 Oct 2015	17 Oct 2020
10.2	23 May 2017	23 May 2022
10.3	25 May 2018	25 May 2023
10.4	18 Jun 2019	18 Jun 2024
10.5	24 Jun 2020	24 Jun 2025
10.6	6 Jul 2021	6 Jul 2026
10.7	9 Feb 2022	9 Feb 2023
10.8	20 May 2022	20 May 2023
10.9	TBC	TBC
10.10	TBC	TBC

These dates constitute the public policy of the MariaDB Foundation and are not legally binding. The software is released with the GPL license as-is, without warranties.

Exceptions for MariaDB versions in widespread use

The MariaDB Foundation may decide to maintain selected releases beyond the normal 5 years if they are in exceptionally widespread use. As MariaDB 5.5 was included in multiple prominent Linux distributions with a lifespan beyond 2017, the Foundation committed to maintaining it until 2020.

Maintenance periods by service providers

Some MariaDB service providers might offer under contract longer, or otherwise more extensive, maintenance periods. Some Linux distributions may also offer extended support periods for the MariaDB versions they shipped.

Please contact the commercial service providers if you use MariaDB in a critical production environment and you want to have contractual warranties regarding your use and maintenance of the MariaDB software.

Semantic versioning

MariaDB aims to follow the semantic versioning standard. In client-server APIs we follow it fully and in the server we follow it in spirit.

Micro releases (patch versions) e.g. 5.5.x and 10.0.x only fix security issues and bugs. Minor version releases e.g. 5.x and 10.x add functionality but maintain backwards-compatibility. Major releases e.g. 10.0 and 11.0 may make backwards-incompatible changes.

For details about semantic versioning, see semver.org.

In all releases, including major releases, we always make sure that the mysql_upgrade facility runs correctly and the database files from any older release can be upgraded.

Privacy policy

MariaDB Foundation strongly believes in privacy laws and adheres to the rules of GDPR. View our full privacy policy here.

Security policy

MariaDB Foundation is committed to ensuring all security bugs are fixed within stable MariaDB Server versions. Security issues can be reported via security@mariadb.org or under the HackerOne Program.

The MariaDB Server developers classify all security bugs according to their threat level. The threat level can be one of:

Critical: an exploitable vulnerability that causes arbitrary code execution or allows an unauthenticated user to crash the server or get access to the data.
Medium: everything else.

We strive to fix any Critical security bug immediately, usually within hours, and release fixed MariaDB binaries as soon as possible, usually the next day.

We will fix Medium security bugs as soon as possible, but we will not change our planned release schedule to get the fix out earlier.

Please review our Security Policy and Assets covered within that we have available on our HackerOne profile.

We will also follow responsible disclosure procedures and also alert related projects and forks such as Oracle MySQL and Percona Server if we believe a reported security issue affects those projects as well.

Other

Logos and badges

Please click on the logos for the full-sized versions.

MariaDB Foundation Logo. Horizontal orientation. For use over dark backgrounds.

MariaDB Foundation Logo. Vertical orientation. For use over dark backgrounds.

MariaDB Foundation Logo. Vertical orientation.

MariaDB Foundation Logo. Horizontal orientation.

Usage statistics

Beginning in October 2011, MariaDB Server included a new User Feedback plugin. When the plugin is activated (it is inactive by default), it can periodically upload configuration and usage information to mariadb.org. Alternatively, one can upload this information manually using the Upload Data page or with popular command line tools.

The information gathered by the User Feedback plugin provides the MariaDB project with useful input in form of:

which platforms and hardware MariaDB is run on
an indication of the worldwide distribution of MariaDB
the version and build numbers of MariaDB that are in use
features that are used

The main purpose behind collecting this kind of information is to use it to steer engineering and community development of MariaDB Server in the right directions. The information is used to continuously improve the product.

The User Feedback plugin gathers only non-sensitive information such as:

processor type, speed, amount of processors/cores
operating system, distribution, and kernel information
storage engines that are in use
list of loaded plugins
and other similar data

The User Feedback plugin will never send any personal or sensitive information such as user names, database names or contents, or anything that would enable the tracking of the user.

The complete manual of the User Feedback plugin, including instructions for how to see what exactly is being sent, can be found on the User Feedback plugin page of the MariaDB Knowledgebase.

Statistics

If you would like to manually upload data from your MariaDB instance please use the Upload Data page.

Merchandise

Please show your support by purchasing official MariaDB merchandise.