Selected by the DBTA community, the award validates growing industry recognition of MariaDB’s momentum following significant platform innovation and investment over the past two years.
MILPITAS, Calif. and DUBLIN — August 5, 2026 — MariaDB plc, the enterprise database platform for agentic AI, today announced that it has been named Best Overall Database in the 2026 DBTA Readers’ Choice Awards. This marks the second consecutive year and third time overall that MariaDB has received the honor.
Presented annually by Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) magazine, the DBTA Readers’ Choice Awards recognize the industry’s leading database and data management technologies based on votes from the publication’s readers, including enterprise IT professionals, database administrators and data practitioners.
The recognition comes at a time of significant innovation for MariaDB, as organizations increasingly seek a unified database platform that supports transactions, analytics and AI workloads. The recent acquisition of GridGain strengthens MariaDB’s unified open database with high-performance in-memory computing for real-time AI workloads, complementing the company’s broader investments in production-ready AI capabilities.
“Receiving this recognition from the DBTA community for the second consecutive year is especially meaningful because it reflects the confidence of the database professionals building and operating today’s most critical applications,” said Vikas Mathur, chief product officer, MariaDB plc. “As AI moves from experimentation into production, enterprises need more than another AI tool. They need a trusted data foundation. MariaDB helps organizations bring operational, analytical and AI workloads together on a single open platform so they can innovate faster without sacrificing performance, reliability or security.”
“A modern information architecture is essential to support cloud for data and analytics, data warehouse modernization and the integration of AI-driven insights,” said Tom Hogan, group publisher, Database Trends and Applications. “To help companies progress along their data-driven journeys, each year, DBTA presents the Readers’ Choice Awards, offering the opportunity to recognize the best of the best companies whose products have been selected by you – our readers!”
The award builds on a year of continued innovation and industry recognition for MariaDB. Earlier this year, the company was named Data Management Platform of the Year in the 2026 Data Breakthrough Awards for its unified platform that enables organizations to build AI-powered applications while simplifying data infrastructure. MariaDB also launched MariaDB Enterprise Platform 2026, introducing native retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, integrated vector search and dedicated AI frameworks to help organizations build and deploy production-ready AI applications.
The MariaDB database has now been downloaded over 3 billion times worldwide, tripling its total downloads in just the past year, reflecting the company’s rapid growth and continued momentum in enterprise AI and data infrastructure. Today, MariaDB powers mission-critical workloads across industries, including financial services, banking, aviation, 5G networks, healthcare, prescription management and the public sector.
About MariaDB
MariaDB seeks to eliminate the constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling organizations to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. Enterprises can depend on a single complete hybrid database platform for all their needs, that can be deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical, hybrid and AI use cases. Trusted by organizations such as Deutsche Bank, DBS, Nokia, Red Hat, Samsung and VirginMedia O2 – MariaDB delivers customer value without the financial burden of legacy database providers. For more information, please visit wp.mariadb.com.
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