back to article MariaDB ditches products and staff in restructure, bags $26.5M loan to cushion fall

MariaDB is ditching strategic products and cutting 28 percent of the workforce as it struggles to overcome the financial challenges its faced since floating on the stock market. The company also announced access to a new $26.5 million loan facility. In a US Securities and Exchange Commission notice published yesterday [PDF], …

  1. abend0c4 Silver badge

    SkySQL was launched to rival RDBMS services from cloud vendors

    I think Sir Humphrey would have described that decision as "courageous".

  2. Nate Amsden

    forced to explain to customers...

    "Yeah, we realized a bit too late that cloud is really expensive and not worth it since we don't have unlimited money, and are unable to charge a fee that would allow us to operate that way and still have any customers".

    Nice to see more people realize this, though perhaps too late for MariaDB time will tell. I've used MariaDB for several years after migrating from Percona after Percona jacked up their fees by about 10x many years ago out of nowhere. Though not in cloud, and not paying for any support. Seems to be a fine product but I'm not a DBA, though sometimes play one on TV.

    1. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

      Re: forced to explain to customers...

      Yeah. Back when I started out in Linux in the 1990s, MySQL was considered simpler, faster, while PostgreSQL was considered to be more feature complete but not as fast. Then, over the next couple years, MySQL gained features, PostgreSQL gained speed, so both have been quite fast and feature complete for years. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, started when Oracle bought Sun for similar reasons to Libreoffice forking from OpenOffice at around that time.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: forced to explain to customers...

        I'd certainly agree that Postgres has got faster, better and more features, especially the ones for bigger commercial users. This is why there is now a reasonable commercial ecosystem around including migration off Oracle.

        But while MySQL has become less buggy under Oracle's stewardship but to suggest it's anything like near Postgres' features is nonsense. Oracle, which is still doing the majority of the development, is never going to give MySQL most of the features that it can charge customers a small for fortune for OracleDB. It essentially offers MySQL plus support contracts. It was always going to be difficult for MariaDB to get anywhere in this environment if it was hoping that the never-Oracle crowd would also contain people prepared to pay for support and maintenance.

  3. Smartypantz

    LAMP/WAMP

    Is dead as a door nail, and so is MySQL/MariaDB.

    1. dr john

      Re: LAMP/WAMP

      I think you will find that almost every webhosting company offers MariaDB and a few small systems like WordPress used by only 45% of websites world wide, run on MariaDB. And many of WordPress's rivals run on MariaDB to.

      So saying MySQL / MariaDB is dead as a door nail might not be totally accurate.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Re: LAMP/WAMP

      Ridiculous comment which doesn't separate those 4-5 things from what they actually are.

      L - Linux. Definitely isn't dead. W - Windows, same.

      A - Apache. The predominant web server.

      M - MySQL / MariaDB. The former absolutely isn't dead and this story doesn't mean that the second one will die. Many popular open source web applications such as Wordpress or Magento support it and the number of sites running these alone is in the millions. Not to mention many other sites and apps that rely on it.

      P - PHP. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but still very common. Often said to be "dead" by people who use alternatives and find their shitty applications being rebuilt in PHP by somebody on more money later on.

      If you mean the approach taken 15+ years ago where all 4 were treated as some bundle to build an application then yes that's dying out (although still not totally dead). But in their own right each of these are ubiquitous and the usage numbers for all have only increased over time.

      1. Baximelter

        Re: LAMP/WAMP

        Yes, the P of LAMP usually is PHP, but don't forget that originally it was Perl - and still is Perl on my systems.

    3. naive

      Re: LAMP/WAMP

      No idea whether this constitutes some Redmond trolling, but a simple google query reveals: Linux is used to power 96.3% of the world's top web servers.

      (google with keyword: percentage of linux based web servers)

  4. Tim 11

    will this affect the free database software versions?

    will this affect the free database software versions?

    1. drankinatty

      Re: will this affect the free database software versions?

      Doubtful, millions of beta-testers are a difficult expense to justify to the board when they are what has made your core product work since you forked it. Taking a FOSS based company public is always a tricky proposition. Ask Mandrake...

  5. Lon24

    Samsung

    If it's that vital to Samsung and is probably better engineered than a costly migration to another product begs the question - why wasn't it worth Samsung taking a stake to bail itself out of the problem? Mere peanuts to this chaebol's coffers.

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