MariaDB Welcomes Former VP and General Manager of Amazon RDS to Board of Directors

Following a distinguished career at Amazon and Microsoft, Hal Berenson joins MariaDB to support its distributed SQL vision with MariaDB Xpand

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and HELSINKI – October 3, 2022 – MariaDB® Corporation today announced Hal Berenson has joined its board of directors. Berenson is well known for his technical and management leadership roles developing Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS), Microsoft SQL Server and DEC Rdb before it was acquired by Oracle. With a lifetime spent tackling some of the most challenging database problems, Berenson lends his expertise to support the success of MariaDB and, in particular, its distributed SQL database, Xpand.

Tweet this: Former VP and General Manager of Amazon RDS Hal Berenson joins @mariadb Board of Directors to support the success of #Xpand! #DistributedSQL More details: https://bit.ly/3UNsk9j

“Despite the advantages of scale-out over scale-up, building distributed relational database systems has remained elusive since the initial successes of the 1980s. Realizing all of the desired characteristics of excellent scaling, extreme high availability, application isolation from failures and distribution details, plus all the traditional characteristics of a single system database has remained out of reach. It’s been my career frustration that we haven’t been able to deliver this yet,” said Berenson. “What MariaDB has built with Xpand is extremely exciting. It delivers true read and write scale, with the other characteristics we’ve been looking for in a distributed database. With MariaDB SkySQL, the company has the ability to make Xpand the key database that solves business’ scalability and availability pain points with all the benefits of a cloud service. I’m excited to join MariaDB’s board to help guide the company toward even greater success.” 

Berenson served as VP and general manager of Amazon RDS, portions of Amazon Aurora, and the Database Migration Service. He was responsible for overall business leadership including engineering, product management and operations. At Microsoft, he managed multiple SQL Server projects, led the “Quests” corporate technical strategy, led a team to look at new ways for Microsoft’s product groups to engage with large enterprise customers on future product development, worked on Mobile Development Tools strategy, and drove the strategy for addressing “hard problems” as chief architect in the Identity and Security Division.

 Earlier in his career, Berenson worked in multiple senior engineering roles for Digital Equipment Corporation, including as technical director (chief architect) for database, transaction processing, and systems management. Earlier he led the re-engineering of Rdb/VMS into a high-performance OLTP database engine, before Rdb’s acquisition by Oracle.

“MariaDB Xpand is quickly rising to be one of our most important database products to solve the scalability challenge that so many large enterprises are struggling with,” said Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB Corporation. “Hal Berenson has a superb track record in the database industry, is a visionary and is highly respected. Having him join our board positions us well as we expand our reach and grow our distributed SQL business.”

MariaDB Xpand is a new generation relational database that is purpose-built for scale. It delivers unstoppable performance, and is indestructible, resilient to node, zone and site failures. Xpand supports millions of users at global companies, such as Samsung, and can be deployed in the cloud as a fully managed database service using MariaDB SkySQL. Xpand was recognized as one of the front-runners in the 21st century database wars, winning Foundry’s InfoWorld 2022 Technology of the Year Award.

To learn more about MariaDB Xpand’s distributed SQL capabilities, visit: mariadb.com/xpand. 

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About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, 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 their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB™.