MariaDB Announces New Innovation Release Model

Quarterly release structure delivers new features to the community faster

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and HELSINKI – December 9, 2021 – MariaDB Corporation Ab and MariaDB Foundation today announced a new release model for MariaDB Community Server, often referred to as MariaDB Server, centered on the goal of delivering new features and innovation faster to the millions of MariaDB users around the world. Under the new model, new community server release series, such as MariaDB Community Server 10.6 or 10.7, occur once a quarter, rather than once a year, bringing more opportunities for new features and contributions to be delivered to the MariaDB user base. 

“The cloud has created an expectation of continuous innovation and deployment,” said Max Mether, co-founder and vice president of server product management, MariaDB Corporation. “In addition, other successful open source projects, such as Ubuntu and Fedora have adopted a similar frequent release model. By changing the release model, we’ll be able to meet today’s expectations for faster and more predictable innovation cycles for the MariaDB community.” 

Starting with the next major update, the new MariaDB Community Server release series will be available on a quarterly basis and each release series will be maintained for one year. In collaboration with Linux distributions, some release series will be selected for longer maintenance windows, expected to happen at least every other year. MariaDB Enterprise, built to meet the most challenging reliability, stability, security and scalability requirements, will continue to be released on a consistent basis by MariaDB Corporation with maintenance lasting at least five years for each release series.

“MariaDB has one of the largest and most engaged communities in open source,” said Kaj Arnö, CEO, MariaDB Foundation. “With an emphasis on more frequent new features, we believe this will drive even broader adoption of MariaDB Server around the globe. It also will increase engagement with the community as there will now be four yearly opportunities for contributors to see their code merged.”

“For over eight years, MariaDB has been a popular database choice in the Fedora Linux distribution,” said Michal Schorm, Fedora Project contributor and MariaDB package maintainer for Fedora Linux. “I look forward to continuing my collaboration with the team behind MariaDB to bring future releases under their new release model to the vast user base that rely on Fedora Linux every day.”

Additional Resources

About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for all their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers unmatched operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s the fastest growing open source database. Real business relies on MariaDB®.

About MariaDB Foundation

The MariaDB Foundation supports continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem. The Foundation guarantees that there is a global contact point for collaboration and that the community can always rely upon MariaDB Server.