MariaDB is a name with deep roots in the open-source database world, but in 2025 it is showing the energy and ambition of a company on the rise. Taken private in 2022 and backed by K1 Investment Management, MariaDB is doubling down on innovation while positioning itself as a strong alternative to MySQL and Oracle. At a time when many organisations are frustrated with Oracle's pricing and MySQL's cloud-first pivot, MariaDB is finding new opportunities by combining open-source freedom with enterprise-grade reliability.

In this conversation, I sit down with Vikas Mathur, Chief Product Officer at MariaDB, to explore how the company is capitalising on these market shifts. Vikas shares the thinking behind MariaDB's renewed focus, explains how the platform delivers similar features to Oracle at up to 80 percent lower total cost of ownership, and details how recent innovations are opening the door to new workloads and use cases.

One of the most significant developments is the launch of Vector Search in January 2023. This feature is built directly into InnoDB, eliminating the need for separate vector databases and delivering two to three times the performance of PG Vector. With hardware acceleration on both x86 and IBM Power architectures, and native connectors for leading AI frameworks such as LlamaIndex, LangChain and Spring AI, MariaDB is making it easier for developers to integrate AI capabilities without complex custom work.

Vikas explains how MariaDB's pluggable storage engine architecture allows users to match the right engine to the right workload. InnoDB handles balanced transactional workloads, MyRocks is optimised for heavy writes, ColumnStore supports analytical queries, and Moroonga enables text search. With native JSON support and more than forty functions for manipulating semi-structured data, MariaDB can also remove the need for separate document databases. This flexibility underpins the company's vision of one database for infinite possibilities.

The discussion also examines how MariaDB manages the balance between its open-source community and enterprise customers. Community adoption provides early feedback on new features and helps drive rapid improvement, while enterprise customers benefit from production support, advanced security, high availability and disaster recovery capabilities such as Galera-based synchronous replication and the MacScale proxy.

We look ahead to how MariaDB plans to expand its managed cloud services, including DBaaS and serverless options, and how the company is working on a "RAG in a box" approach to simplify retrieval-augmented generation for DBAs. Vikas also shares his perspective on market trends, from the shift away from embedded AI and traditional machine learning features toward LLM-powered applications, to the growing number of companies moving from NoSQL back to SQL for scalability and long-term maintainability.

This is a deep dive into the strategy, technology and market forces shaping MariaDB's next chapter. It will be of interest to database architects, AI engineers, and technology leaders looking for insight into how an open-source veteran is reinventing itself for the AI era while challenging the biggest names in the industry.