Category Archives: Development
I suppose not all of my readers have a first hand (or even second hand) experience of the girls-night-in. So let me shed some light on this sacred ritual of tea, sympathy and soul-baring conversation that zigzags from the ridiculous to the profound and back again in under 30 seconds.
There a few eternal mysteries that always seem to come up –
Like:
“Why do I have nothing to wear when my wardrobe is clearly full of clothes?”
And:
“Why does cat food smell weirdly delicious?”
(Okay, I do know the answer to that one: stop crash-dieting already!
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Continue reading “The Queen, the contributions and the wardrobe”
I had the delight of being accepted to talk about “Making AI transparent with RAG on your own data” at foss-north 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden. On April 14th at Chalmers University, I got to share with a full room on how AI RAG is done with MariaDB Vector, kicking off with a use case about scaling Wikipedia editing with GenAI.
Improving Wikipedia with RAG
I presented a use case example from my experience of editing Wikipedia at scale with GenAI for non-profit Projekt Fredrika.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Vector and RAG at foss-north 2025”
We’ve made significant progress on MariaDB Catalogs, and while there’s still work to be done, we’re excited to offer the community an easy way to try out our preview release. You no longer need to compile the source code yourself—just use our prebuilt containers, now available on our official quay.io development registry.
The code is available publicly on Github, in a separate repo compared to the official MariaDB Server (until the feature gets published as part of an official MariaDB Server release)
Documentation is available on the Knowledge Base.
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Continue reading “MariaDB Catalogs preview containers available”
MariaDB uses Clang’s memory, address, and undefined behavior sanitizers are used for identify coding flaws during the continuous development and testing process. MariaDB would like to share via an online event on how easy perform the same sanitizer checking.
The MemorySanitizer environment is particularly onerous to create. Because MariaDB use container based build and testing, we have an environment that can be re-used by anyone.
Our “Deep Dives” were once an internal skills transfer mechanism, however for the first time we’re making it available for anyone to join.
This particular deep dive will cover:
- Basics of MemorySanitizer, Address Santizer and Undefined Behavour Sanitizer;
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Continue reading “Deep dive into Clang sanitizer testing with MariaDB”
Shortly, we will start coding a task, for which we would appreciate your input: How would you like to DROP USER?
Why do we ask?
DROP user (originating in MySQL in 2004) always used to just drop the account from the privilege tables, but left all existing connections active. You can argue that this was questionable in 2004, but it’s really unexpected and confusing in 2025, with MariaDB being ubiquitous as it is.
So now we’re considering changing it.
But changing a 20-year-old behavior cannot be done lightly. We want to ask
you, our users, what would you prefer DROP USER to do.
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This past Friday was reserved for our very own cozy event in Bucharest, planned by the romanian squad of the MariaDB Foundation. With an audience ranging from students just starting out on their journey up to seniors with experience in multiple database servers and AI, lots of interesting talks took place. We were glad to meet the Head of Domains and IT Technology of our gold sponsor, IONOS.
Although not his first visit in Romania, Monty’s attendance was a welcome sight, even bringing in people from the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom.
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We had the pleasure on Friday to take individual calls with everybody who submitted to the ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG hackathon.
The ideation phase deadline passed last week, and we are happy to share that we received several promising submissions for both the innovation track and the integration track. Innovation involves applications using MariaDB Vector, like RAG, and integration being enabling MariaDB Vector in an existing framework.
Participants range from individual contributors to even a corporate team. Some already have some experience with AI, and some are newcomers to RAG.
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The ideation phase of the MariaDB AI RAG Hackathon is nearing its deadline on Monday (by end of March).
We have several cool submissions so far. One is about combining the Knowledge Graph and LLMs, using MariaDB Vector Nearest Neighbour Search. Another one is about an “advanced context diff”, identifying the differences between two text corpuses based not on their literal wording, but on their content.
All of the current submissions are in the Innovation track. We would particularly like submissions in the Integration track – to add MariaDB to frameworks such as these, or other apps.
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