Open Database Alliance To Develop & Support MySQL Fork MariaDB

Following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun (who owns MySQL), most analysts expected to see a new fork or similar reactions from the MySQL open source database community. MySQL’s founder Monty Widenius has now initiated The Open Database Alliance, a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database.

This is seemingly an attempt to ensure independent development of the MySQL open-source database, free of its new owner, Oracle. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, a community-developed branch of MySQL.

The intent of the Open Database Alliance is to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL. Still under development, the Open Database Alliance is open to all businesses, organizations and individuals interested in helping create a new, centralized resource for MySQL and to ensure that it remains a top quality, high performance open source database.

Monty Program Ab, founded by Monty Widenius, the “father” of the MySQL database, and Percona, established by MySQL expert Peter Zaitsev, are the founding members of the Open Database Alliance. Monty Program is currently the primary developer of MariaDB, a branch of the MySQL database that includes all major open source storage engines, including the Maria transactional storage engine.

“Our goal with the Open Database Alliance is to provide a central clearinghouse for MySQL development, to encourage a true open development environment with community participation, and to ensure that MySQL code remains extremely high quality,” noted Monty. “Participating members at this stage in the ‘Alliance’ will have a strong voice in how the organization is structured, and we look forward to collaborating with anyone in the industry that provides or depends on MySQL.”

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We are bound to see more action in the MySQL space over the next few months. Will the MySQL community stay with Oracle’s MySQL or migrate to another DB and how Oracle will handle MySQL are still important yet unanswered questions.