MariaDB ditches products and staff in restructure

[jarym]

> The company won praise from analysts for the engineering behind the products.

A bit like a McDonalds fan praising an upmarket restaurant on the quality of their food.

Ok, bit of a cheapshot. In seriousness, I never fully understood MariaDB - there may have been a concern about Oracle's plans for MySQL but was that really enough to start a for-profit corporation?

And in the meantime, the big cloud vendors did a decent job of offering their own SQL options. And then we have Postgres - it was always technologically superior to MySQL but over the past few years its become as easy to deploy and run as MySQL was.

I just don't see what segment or differentiator remained for MariaDB as a for-profit corporation.

[samlambert]

I see the “Postgres is technology superior” take on hn all the time. Can you actually back that up?

Can you explain why the dozens or so Postgres scale up solutions don’t use real Postgres?

Or why anyone at scale with Postgres migrates away?

https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

This outage would have been a lot less likely with MySQL because of redo logs which MySQL has had for a decade. But Postgres replication is under developed. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-datab...

Facebook has evaluated every database on the planet and still uses MySQL. https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/22/core-infra/mysql/

When MySQL has more users, can scale significantly more, runs some of the largest sites on earth, and even lends its storage engine to other databases like Dynamo you should backup your claims that Postgres is technically superior. Please.

[otabdeveloper4]

> ... it was always technologically superior to MySQL

No, it wasn't, and still isn't.

MySQL supports replication correctly and out of the box, Postgres still hasn't figured this out.

(Replication is the #1 important feature for any setup that is larger than one server.)

[traceroute66]

> concern about Oracle's plans for MySQL but was that really enough to start a for-profit corporation

Perhaps even more so because Percona already pre-dated MariaDB.

Also as I understand it Percona is much closer to Oracle MySQL than MariaDB because MariaDB was a point-in-time fork on 5.5.

[ekianjo]

MariaDB is for companies that rely on MySQL and don't want to migrate to a non-MySQL solution, for various reasons.

[nickstinemates]

There's hundreds of thousands of small companies out there that run a mariadb database that needs support. That's who mariadb sells to. Consequently, they have a lot of very small customers all over the world.

[optymizer]

10-15 years ago, the MySQL cli has was far more user friendly than PostgreSQL. I don't remember the specifics, but I found postgres pedantic and lacking shortcuts that made life easier. That said I liked PHP too.

[treprinum]

Sun Microsystems paid some billion to MySQL authors that then decided to have more fun with MariaDB and started to compete with Sun/later Oracle again. Not sure where did the billion go if MariaDB is now in need to raise debt...

[ArtTimeInvestor]

The free MariaDB software is awesome. Because of that, I am very curious about their business.

But looking at their financials, I get the feeling they have a "too much money" problem.

They are spending about $3M per month on "Research and development".

They are spending about $2M per month on "Sales and marketing".

They are spending about $2M per month on "General and administrative".

At a company valuation of under $50M and monthly revenue of under $5M.

Cutting down on the spending is probably the right thing.

Spending millions per month on sales and marketing and having only $5M MRR to show for it seems like the marketing is not effective.

Spending millions per month on development and not having a killer product that sells itself seems like the development is not effective.

[mvdtnz]

> Earlier this week, the company also announced a new finance package [PDF]. RP Ventures has agreed to a $26.5 million "senior secured promissory note" – a form of credit agreement – at an interest rate of 10 percent per annum.

> The facility will be used to pay off a European Investment Bank loan, with a maturity date of October 11, 2023.

> The new VC loan has a maturity date to a maximum of January 10, 2024.

I'm no business expert but this strikes me as the corporate equivalent of taking payday loans to make your car payment.

[kadomony]

CMO terminated the same day, so I'm assuming their marketing department largely was gutted as well while they figure out how to rebuild their image.

It looks like they're taking the route of just focusing on enterprise customers, which seems risky given the competition in that space is already fairly entrenched and dominant.

Personally, I don't see them lasting another 5 years. At least, not thriving.

[ArtTimeInvestor]

Who is willing to pay for using a DB besides enterprise customers?

[pengaru]

If they were focusing on enterprise customers they wouldn't have terminated the Xpand(formerly Clustrix) engineering team.

[maxxxxxx]

Surprising to see them ditch their cloud product. Especially considering the number of startups out there based around offering a cloud database.

[mardifoufs]

Yes I thought managed databases were the holy grail of database monetization. How bad were the cloud services that they were providing? They seemed to put quite a lot of effort into that part of their offering too.

[ilyt]

No wonder, if you outsource management of DB to someone else why on earth you'd want to have MySQL/MariaDB ?

[politelemon]

Why did they decide to go public, why not continue operating as a small company with a focused product set?

[femiagbabiaka]

This is the operative question. I think the answer can only be greed.

[gigatexal]

Will SkySQL tech or Xpand be open sourced?

[pengaru]

Good questions.

It's clearly part of the problem that practically nobody in this thread even know WTF Xpand(formerly Clustrix) is, and are judging MariaDB Inc's actions largely on a "why MySQL fork" basis.

My ex-colleagues from Clustrix who stayed on-board through the MariaDB acquisition have all been recently #opentowork and talking of getting terminated on LinkedIn. Not marketing people, these were the engineers maintaining Xpand.

The Xpand/Clustrix tech is far more interesting than any of MariaDB/MySQL/Postgres, but proprietary.

[convolvatron]

I'm personally vested in xpand...I don't know what state its in now, but it would kind of suck if it just got put in a dusty cardboard box in the back of a storage unit.

[wly_cdgr]

No coming back from destroying this much trust, RIP

[kadomony]

What trust did they break exactly? Genuinely naive here. Did they woefully underdeliver on their cloud offering's promises?

[lukevp]

So just price MariaDB 20% cheaper than MySQL and ride off into the sunset on enterprise earnings? No innovation needed. I wonder if their PostgreSQL compatibility layer can be used with MariaDB outside of the cloud, and if that has any benefits.

[jeo123]

Founder pride issue. Started another MySQL once out of Oracle. He should have focus on improving MySQL+PostGreSQL+whatever NoSQL out there. Instead, he wasted resources to build another instance of MySQL. But to his credit though, his action forced Oracle to behave well with MySQL and not decimate it like OpenOffice, once upon a time.

[mathnode]

This is mariadb.com the enterprise branch. Nothing to do with the open source foundation at mariadb.org, which is unaffected by this.