MariaDB: Database of the Year, Record-Setting Fiscal Year, Global Presence at M|17 User Conference

Increasing Number of Enterprises, Developers, DBAs, and Architects Choose MariaDB as Open, Relational Enterprise Database

MENLO PARK, Calif. and HELSINKI, Finland – March 1, 2017 – MariaDB Corporation, the company behind the fastest growing open source database, is starting 2017 with tremendous momentum. MariaDB’s user base has grown beyond 12 million, annual downloads from its website have increased by more than 100%, and its executive team has expanded. The company’s MaxScale product earned Application of the Year at the MySQL Community Awards and MariaDB was just selected over MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB and proprietary solutions, as Database of the Year by LinuxQuestions.org for the fourth year straight. 

Tweet this: Enterprises, developers, DBAs, and architects select #MariaDB as the best database via @LinuxQuestions.org http://bit.ly/2mtNtsz

As the default database in CentOS, RHEL, openSUSE, and Fedora, MariaDB will soon have expanded reach through more distributions just as it launches its inaugural user conference, M|17, this spring.  Designed to address the concerns of enterprise adoption, MariaDB’s engineers, customers and partners will present on a variety of use cases spanning cloud deployments, Database as a Service, migrating off Oracle Enterprise and how MariaDB will support flexible data models and JSON – a typical use case for NoSQL.

“The strategic mandate of Open Source and MariaDB found its place in 2016.  Leading companies all over are waking up and transitioning their spend and time from technology that only benefits vendors, like Amazon or Oracle, to global open source standards, embodied in MariaDB,” said Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB. “Adopting MariaDB for the ever-growing set of new use cases — from China, Singapore, Korea, US, and the EU — will be a big theme of the first MariaDB User Conference, M17 in New York.   It’s not just the what we do, it’s how we do it that makes MariaDB so unique in the aspiration of scalability, high availability, and high performance.”

Other MariaDB highlights from 2016 include:

Market Disruption and Product Innovation

MariaDB continued its delivery of innovative product development including frequent product updates for MariaDB Server, MariaDB MaxScale, and the introduction of a new analytic offering with MariaDB ColumnStore.

• MariaDB Server is the open source enterprise-grade database, providing extensibility and security at every layer. New product features released throughout 2016 include advanced clustering options, expanded storage engine support, packages for Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian, and ongoing security enhancements.
• MariaDB MaxScale is a de-coupled proxy that manages security, scalability, and high availability in scale-out deployments. MaxScale 2.0 offers important new functionality that integrates data streaming with Kafka and other data sources, as well as significant development work for better security and high availability.
• MariaDB ColumnStore is a revolutionary extension of MariaDB that facilitates and handles complex analytical workloads that only proprietary and expensive data warehouse appliances could before the advent of ColumnStore.
• Business Source Licensing (BSL): MariaDB announced BSL, a new eventual open source license conceived by MariaDB founder Monty Widenius and MySQL co-founder David Axmark. BSL offers a better approach to open source code than restrictive approaches like open core.

Expansion of Executive Team

MariaDB added both deep technical expertise and broad management experience with its hiring of four key executives.

• Michael Howard, veteran enterprise executive at C9, Greenplum, and Oracle joined as CEO in January
• Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL and MariaDB named as CTO, in January
• Cate Lochead, former Oracle and Couchbase executive appointed as CMO in July
• Roger Bodamer, former MongoDB and Oracle executive hired as CPO, in July

Customer Growth

In 2016, MariaDB more than doubled the number of web site downloads, increased enterprise adoption, and focused on building out its enterprise support capabilities. The company continues to sign up customers moving away from proprietary databases from Oracle and Microsoft.

Customer quotes and recent articles include:

• Quote from Ken Tanaka, MicroCAD: “MariaDB was chosen over Oracle because of its high quality, modern services and secure data management features.”
• Quote from Aziz Vahora, Head of Data Management at Pinger: “MariaDB ColumnStore is the future of data warehousing. ColumnStore allows us to store more data and analyze it faster. Everyday, Pinger’s mobile applications process millions of text messages and phone calls. We also process more than 1.5 billion rows of logs per day. Analytic scalability and performance is critical to our business. MariaDB’s ColumnStore manages massive amounts of data and will scale with Pinger as we grow.”
• Quote from Olli Nokso-Koivisto, CEO, LeadDesk: “With MariaDB MaxScale, there is no technical limit for scalability through sharding, and we were able to deploy quickly without having to modify our applications. MariaDB is the best in town for cloud database solutions and this is why we chose MaxScale.”
• Diginomica article interviewing Steve Sharpe, Application Architect at Teleplan: Regarding Teleplan’s migration to MariaDB from Oracle: “We haven’t had a single issue.” Teleplan said that creating a report with Oracle took fifteen seconds and this improved to less than a second with MariaDB, “And that’s without us doing anything clever… We’ve got a lot better – or the same – performance without doing anything big about it.”
• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation blog on MariaDB.com: “IHME Believes Open Source MariaDB ColumnStore Is The Future of Data Warehousing”

About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB Corporation is the company behind MariaDB, the fastest growing Open Source database. Started by the founders of MySQL, MariaDB Corporation is reinventing the database to support today’s enterprise needs. The company also builds complementary products, including MariaDB MaxScale and MariaDB ColumnStore, that are valuable for deploying MariaDB in large, mission-critical production environments.

MariaDB Corporation provides world-class support and training for its products. The company is an active sponsor of the MariaDB Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem.