Commercial use of MariaDB & Webinar with SkySQL

A lot of things is happening in the MariaDB world; We just had our developers conference in Athens, we are about to bring out MariaDB 5.3 -RC and MariaDB 5.5-beta. MariaDB 5.5 will include all the closed source extensions that Oracle have announced for MySQL 5.6. It's nice to see that the open source community can continue to produce open source software to rival and exceed closed source offerings.

At the same time, we need commercial goals to support the growth of free software. The development crew in Monty Program Ab, all ex-MySQL developers, are happy to develop features based on commercial agreements. These will of course be released as open source to the benefit of the entire community of users. The support staff of SkySQL is happy to give you commercial 24x7 support of MariaDB, so you have the same level of support that you werea used to for MySQL in the days of MySQL AB: The first person you talk to should know more than you about MySQL!

The fact that we at Monty Program focus on development should by no means deter you from relying on MariaDB in commercial settings. Our work with SkySQL is intended to accelerate adoption for users and customers who need mission critical services.

To learn how you best extend your usage of MariaDB inside a commercial organization, consider taking part in the SkySQL webinar on Thursday 8 Dec 2011 at 8am PT (11am ET, 16:00 UK, 17:00 CET, or 18:00 EET).

Unfortunately I will not be there to share Black Vodka with you, but other familiar voices will present for you

• Colin Charles, the Chief Evangelist at Monty Program, on when and why to use MariaDB in a commercial setting
• Rasmus Johansson, the Monty Program COO, on the offerings of Monty Program Ab and how to interact with us commercially
• Kaj Arnö, EVP Products at SkySQL, on how SkySQL supports MariaDB users technically and commercially

The webinar is a good time to give us feedback on what we need to do to make it easier for you to adopt MariaDB and/or get more of MySQL in critical and high performance environments.

You can register to the seminar here.

MariaDB developer meeting in Athens

It's time for the next MariaDB developer meeting. This time it's in Athens from 11-November to 14'th of November.

The reason for choosing Athens was that the previous MariaDB developer meetings has been in places like Iceland, Spain and Portugal (all countries with some financial issues) and we thought it was no more than right to support Greece next.

As before, the meeting is open for everyone that wants to attend.

The agenda can be found here. This is also the place where all proposed and agreed to plans will be be posted.

We will try to keep the #maria IRC channel on Freenode up to date about what is happening. If you have any questions about a session, you can ask questions on the channel and we will do our best to answer them.

The main topic of the meeting is to finalise the plans for MariaDB 5.6 now when MariaDB 5.5 is close to completion. (MariaDB 5.3 + MySQL 5.5 -> MariaDB 5.5 merge is done and we are now fixing the final issues found by our test systems so that we can do the first alpha binary release of MariaDB 5.5).

If you have any ideas or suggestions for what we should do in 5.6, please update either the plans page or send an email to maria-developers at lists.launchpad.net list.