Today I am excited to announce that I have started a new job as the General Manager for MariaDB at Percona.

I’ve been an admirer of Percona for some time. In fact, I always hoped that I could grow OpenNMS into an organization like Percona, so joining that team feels like coming back to my roots.

Percona is a “pure” open source company in that they don’t generate revenue from software licenses. As I’ve grown older I’ve mellowed a bit on my views on “open core” software, as it does create more free software even if not all of it is free, but there is one reason I prefer the Percona model: customer obsession.

When, as a company, you don’t have the vendor lock-in to keep customers from leaving, you have to make sure you provide value. Percona recognizes that open source software is frequently the best option for companies, especially in the database space, and they provide value by making it easier to use, more secure and more stable.

At OpenNMS I defined our mission statement as “Help Customers. Have Fun. Make Money”. If you help customers and have fun doing it, the money will come, and Percona has turned helping customers into an art form.

Percona’s focus is databases. No matter your business, you will need to store data, insure is it highly available and that it can be accessed quickly. Open source solutions, whether it involves traditional relational databases, key/value store or a NoSQL document store, have proven themselves to rise to that challenge. But without a traditional software vendor, as a user how can you be sure you are getting the most out of your open source solution?

This is where Percona steps in. They have decades of expertise in this area, and without a vested interest in forcing you to a particular solution they are in a great position to insure customer success. Running your database on-prem? No problem. Running it under Kubernetes? Also, no problem. Have a need to run it at a hyperscalar such as AWS? They can help with that, allowing you to get the best performance for the lowest cost. Need to migrate from on-prem to the cloud, cloud to on-prem, or to create a hybrid solution? Percona has you covered.

The other thing that has me excited about this job is that I get to focus on MariaDB. Of the “big three” open source RDBMS solutions, MariaDB is the least popular, and I hope to change that.

MariaDB was created by Monty Widenius, who also created MySQL. I first met Monty at a tram stop in Portland, Oregon, back at the OSCON held in 2010. This was right after MariaDB was created due to the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. There were times when I very much disagreed with Monty (he did, after all, create the “business source” license), and for a long time my opinion of MariaDB was pretty neutral - not really positive but not really negative.

This changed when Monty and Anna Widenius invited me and others to their home in 2022 for a MariaDB Server Fest. I got to know the Monty who fills up suitcases with comic books when he visits London, and who has a boa constrictor also named Monty. I also got to meet the team behind MariaDB and to understand their dedication to building the best open source relational database possible.

It made me a fan.

MariaDB has been quietly “getting it done” for over 15 years now. At FOSDEM this year there was even a slide talking about how compatible MariaDB is with Oracle. Remember Oracle? There is so much discussion about which open source database is better that it feels like folks have forgotten that they were created as an alternative to Oracle’s RDBMS. One of the things I will be pushing for as a GM at Percona will be to convert even more proprietary database users to open source.

Finally, the icing on the cake will be that I get to work with an incredible team. I’ve known Peter Zaitsev for years, and this past year I got to meet Vadim Tkachenko. At my first FOSDEM as an AWS employee I got to meet Peter Farkas, and in talking to him about this role I was impressed at how well he understands this business. I got to work with Cara Schindler from the AWS side and now it will be fun to work with her on the Percona side, helping to promote the value that Percona can bring to our partners.

I always hate listing names in a blog post because I’m certain to leave someone out, but I also want to call out Dennis Kittrell, who I got to meet in person at this year’s Open Source Founders Summit, and I also get to work with Bennie Grant, Percona’s COO and a fellow North Carolinian. For an international company spread out across the planet like Percona, it is cool that so many of us choose to live in Carolina.

To finish, I want to call out one person who was instrumental in my eagerness to take this job: Kyle Davis.

I first met Kyle at FOSS Backstage where he was the only AWS speaker who didn’t work for our group. We fixed that soon after the conference, and it was great to have him on the team. He is now the GM for Valkey/Redis at Percona and we had fun brainstorming how to be successful in this role. I’m certain to learn a lot from him.

I want to thank everyone who reached out after I was fired, and apologies for not being able to tell you about my new gig until now. It really is for the best as I’m excited to return to open source, and I’m so humbled to be included on a team such as the one at Percona.

If you are eager to take your database solution to the next level, or if you are just MariaDB-curious, feel free to reach out to me: tarus dot balog at percona dot com.